Deleting Old Snapshots

[dysatguy]

Figured I should start my own thread instead of hijacking the other one.. Sorry Here is a brief history and my problem.

Hello, was wondering if someone could answer a question related to the Delete Snapshots. Since I am new to the VM World and of course have not got any great training thus far on our production ESX 3 server, I created a snapshot before doing an update to our blackberry server that is virtualized. This was a few months ago. I didn't realize that leaving the snapshot not only hampers the performance but can be a problem when deleting them after an extended period of time. I did this and this morning I started the delete of the old snapshots. After the first 15 minutes of Inprogress deleting the snapshot I started to do some reading from people on the forum talking about how this could take hours. To make a long story short my current status is that the snapshot is still committing (I think) but I am not able to log back into the VMWare Infrastructure Client. The message I get is server is taking too long to respond. The other Virtual machines are still running but I cannot get into the client to see the status. I don't even know how big the snapshots on this particular virtual machine are. I guess my question is, is it normal to not be able to get into the client when this process is running (I cannot get into the Http interface either). Next question if the process finishes will I be able to get into the interface again or is there a process I should be restarting. Thanks for your help.

[PaulSvirin]

Try these recipes:

Maybe they will be helpful for you.

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Paul Svirin

StarWind Software developer ( http://www.starwindsoftware.com )

[dysatguy]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the links but is there a way I can use a command line command to see if the process is still working or if I have run out of disk space and the reason I cannot log into the Infrastructure Client is for a different reason?

[dysatguy]

Just an update as to where this is at. I tried the (watch "ls -Ghtu --full-time *.vmdk") command at the console and I can see 2 snapshots it looks like with 2 delta files. These files have dates on them from like 7:00 am and 7:30 this morning. We are at 12 hours now since I issued the delete all through the interface. Should the time stamps on the files be changing? I would hate to reboot the ESX server if the process was still actually running but I am at the point now where if the process isn't running do I restart the ESX server and start rebuilding this Virtual Machine from scratch?? Does anyone have any advice. I am willing to leave it over night but if nothing happens by tomorrow morning I think I am going to reboot the ESX server. Does anyone have any comments? I should also mention that there are 6 Virtual Machines on this ESX Server. 5 of them are all still running, this one that I am deleting the snapshots on stopped responding to ping right after I issued the delete all snapshots. Of course I can not get into the Infrastructure Client to see if the console of the Virtual Machine is still available. Someone please comment. Thanks.

[dysatguy]

Last update. I did get the Virtual machine up again. After 24 hours of no progress on the delete snapshot I decided to take my chances and restart the ESX server. It came back up and I see the reason that it probably wasn't finishing, not enough disk space!!. I created a new vm:storage from the san moved the affected vm over and started it up. It came up fine. One of these nights I will try and delete the snapshot again now that there is some available disk space.

[karavinds1]

hello,

Deleting the snapshot will commit the changes to the VM. Howevr the remove will not do so. Also the CLI tool to commit a snapshot is

vmkfstools -i xxxx-nnnn.vmdk newdisk.vmdk

Aravind K