Hello all, I have a rather peculiar (to me anyway) but serious issue with a file server for one of my customers.
On 2 separate occasions now I have had the misfortune of having to recover a file server from within the Service Console as revert to snapshot just doesn't work.
Background
Server is W2K Advanced, is over 250Gb in size and has lots of shares on it. The server requires approx 35 patches on it. I snapshot the server and this is shown as successful. I run the Windows Update against it. Last night it hung at installing a particular patch, last time it actually went through them all ok. After a reboot all the shares have gone and when I drill down to some of the locations I have issues accessing.
I then go for a revert to snapshot. This appears to be successful, the shares are now back but after about a min I start getting alerts that it could not write to certain data and it has been deleted. After various reboots this issue is still there. The snapshot still sits in the snapshot manager. In essence it has all gone really wrong.
On both occasions I have been onto VMware Support. The 2 occasions are a few weeks apart. On both occasions recovering is fairly straightforward in turning of the VM and editing the VMX file to point directly to the original disks after this bring it back up and all sorted. I then need to go in and delete the delta files and all associated files with it, also have to delete the snapshot file as Virtual Centre still shows the snapshot as being there. I think I have missed a step though, although I deleted the actual snapshot info file VC is still showing the snapshot as there. The guy from a couple of weeks ago completed another step from the console which fixed this, I just can't remeber what it was he done. When I asked the guy from last night he said nothing else needed to be done and it would recreate the file the next time I created a snapshot. Any ideas on this as the snapshot is still showing within VC even though all the files have gone. For obvious reasons I don't want to run any other snapshots against it either.
Therefore on both occasions the snapshot has actually corrupted. I can't find any ref to corruption as it said it had been successful. What VM Support could not tell me though or steer me on why this is happening. This prob is only occuring on this one VM there are more than 60 others with no probs. Support guy from last night suggested upgrading the environment to update 4, it is currently on update 2. Although happy to do this I cannot see how this will fix this particular issue.
Does any of you nice people out there have any ideas, has anyone had it and found why it is happening.
Cheers
H
