Odd Virtual Disk Behaviour-Please Help

[wesneary]

Hello All,

I am wondering if anyone can help. i have started experiencing an odd issue on one of my VM's today.  I have a VM running freenas.  The storage disks that the Storage shares of freeness sit on are physical disks directly connected to the vm and are performing normally, because of the way that freenas works the actual HDD can be fairly small and for the VM it is a preallocated virtual disk that is 16Gb in size.  This is the sole VM sat on a 256 Gb physical hard disk. i noticed today an issue the folder for the VM has grown to be 240Gb in size, this surely can't be normal behaviour for a 16 Gb VM.

I have checked snapshots of which there were two auto protect snapshots which i have deleted and disabled auto protect. This has brought the folder size down to 182Gb.

On using exploerer to view the folder there does seem to be a large number of files as seen below. Is anyone able to explain whether these should be there?  Also if not how to safely remove them.

Thanks In Advance

[wesneary]

Also upon further investigation the Freenas OS is only using 1.8Gb of the 16 Gb file so i am unsure as to why this disk has grown so big.

[a_p_]

What you may try to do if no more snapshots show up in the Snapshot manager, is to create a new snapshot and then delete it again.

André

[wjwj]

Can you please try this -- open 'Snapshot Manager', and check the checkbox of 'Show AutoProtect Snapshots', and then take a look at whether there are some AutoProtect Snapshots display.

[wesneary]

Hi There,

Thanks for the response I did try that and there are no auto protect snapshots as auto protect is disabled.

Does the S suffix lean to a snapshot?

[wjwj]

Not really.

Did you try to clear up virtual disks? for example, using disk utilities to compact disk or defragment disk, or using 'vmware-toolbox-cmd disk shrinkonly' to shrink all disks. Maybe, you can backup VM before that just in case.

[continuum]

Looking at the screenshot tells me that your VM uses 2 virtual disks. Both are at least 33 x 2 Gb = 66 Gb - cant say for sure because your screenshot does not show all the files.
(the s-*** suffix is used for the 2Gb slices required by split vmdks and snapshots)
You also have at least 2 active snapshots.
If snapshotmanager does not display snapshots it just indicates that the vmsd-file is corrupt - which is nothing unusual.

I would suggest to power of the VM and then use vmware-vdiskmanager to clone both disks including the snapshots into new vmdks.
That only is necessary if Andres tip did not work.

[wesneary]

Hi All,

Firstly many thanks for the suggestions so far.

When trying the disk utilise compacting i get the following error:

Hopefully the below screenshots will provide some clarity around the disk setups for the physical disks that are directly connected to provide the storage volumes for the NAS.

Also how do i access the CLI for VMWARE workstation?

[wesneary]

All,

Think i have made some progress i tried to unmount the two large physical disks and re add when doing so i got the screen below:

So i guess that explains the volume of files created, however this seems crazy that the disk files replicate the exact size which effectively means there is only 500Gb useable on a 1tb drive. 

This also presents another problem in that because the freenas filesystem is unreadable by VMware i would need to store these disk files on another drive or within the freenas CIFS share.

I guess there are two outstanding questions then:

1. Is there anyway to bypass or reduce the size of these disk files?

2. When adding the disk would selecting independent mode bypass/prevent these files growing?

Thanks in advance.

[continuum]

Something is very strange here.
How did you manage to create snapshots for physical disks ???
That is something I thought only possible for quite advanced users - Workstation should prevent this.

Right now it looks like you want to replace the physical disks with new ones. Those new vmdks will be blank so I dont think that is what you want.

[wesneary]

Believe me the snapshot creation was not intentional. 🙂 I just created the new virtual disks and selected use physical disk with default options. 

I have tried adding the new virtual disks however they are appearing to behave in the same way with the snapshot disk files being created

[continuum]

Interesting - I would like to have a look myself - if you call me right now ....
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[wesneary · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the offer but after much meddling and a vm rebuild i managed to solve the issue.

The solution was to set the 2 physical disks to independent mode with persistent enabled. for some reason unknown to me this seems to prevent the creation of the multiple disk files, it seems workstation creates them even when there are no snapshots.:smileyconfused:

Time will tell but appears to have resolved the issues. Fingers Crossed:smileylaugh:

Thanks for all the help guys.