Cannot share vm which has been linked Clone Master

[Imnowhere]

Hi,

I'm running vmware 12.5 workstation on linux.

There is a vm which had a few snapshots and a linked clone made upon it.

However linked clone was just for testing purpose and it was deleted.

Now there appears a problem when I want to share this vm again.

Sharing dialog states:

"This virtual machine cannot be moved, because it has linked clones"

This has been correct for a certain time, but since linked clone has been deleted, there is no more linked clone.

Now ignoring that and continue sharing would lead to the point that existing snapshots would get lost.

Can I somehow tell vmware / the specific vm that there are no more linked clones?

All finding concerning this problem deal with linked clone it self, but none about the (ex) clone master and how to fix it.

Thanks in advance

[wila]

It sounds like that during the time of one of your snapshots, the VM was part of linked clones.

If you want to share the VM then it has to be copied to another location and all snapshots that where the VM was part of a linked clone setup have to be committed.

--
Wil

[Imnowhere]

Thanks for Your answer wil!

Well, yes, the vm had a few snapshots while beeing shared, one of them while vm was up, then it was shutdown and a linked clone was build on that.

This linked clone was removed after a couple of minutes.

Now, to be sure. "Commiting" isn't a UI function? It happens "on the fly", e.g. at least when a creating another snapshot?

And "copy" is meant to be a physical copy to another workstation like '(s)cp -r ..' or similar? Or an UI "Upload"?

I would understand, that another snapshot triggers some process, which "heals" the linked clone flagging inside vm - whatever it is.

But what is the "copy" part about?

[Imnowhere]

I think I have been missunderstood.

Commiting Snapshots is not what I need. In my understanding it's like deleting a snapshot.

But actually I want to keep all snapshots.

My problem is about the way to share this machine again:

When trying to share a vm again, which once have had linked clones, vmware workstation says, it could not move it (and keep snapshots), because the vm has linked clones. In fact there are no linked clones, the linked clone was deleted. The only option left for sharing is to share it as clone, which wouldn't be a problem, but this clone doesn't keep the old snapshots anymore.

The full message from share dialog is:

"This virtual machine cannot be moved, because it has linked clones"

Which is no longer true.

So I'd like to tell vmware, that there are no linked clones anymore in this specific vm.

Does anybody know a way to achieve this?

regards

[wila]

Hi,

Sorry for not following up. Very busy atm and some things like my help here have slipped through a bit.

Yes committing a snapshot means deleting a snapshot with preservation of your current state.

If you have a snapshot while your VM was part of a linked clone then you cannot share the VM without deleting that snapshot.

AFAIK, there is no way around that without breaking things.

I mentioned "copy" because when you share a VM, one of the things that Workstation does for you is copy your VM from its current location to the folder that has been setup for shared virtual machines. This is why you can't share as doing so would break the linked clone.

--

Wil