I have a tiny, VMWare environment housing 3 Windows VMs.
Recently, I had a problem occur when launching a replication job from my backup software. I don't blame them for this yet, so I won't name them here. The important bit is that when the replication job started, the VM in question became unreachable instantly. The VM was frozen for nearly half an hour before I decided to go the nuclear route and force it off. I then right-clicked on the vm, snapshots>Reconconcile and waited for the green light. Then I noticed that there was 1.2TB snapshot on the VM. There was a tag on it that the Backup software created the snapshot yesterday around noon. That backup job was finished, so with the VM off, I sent a command to delete the snapshot. About an hour in, one of my co-workers asked me for some files stored on that server (it is our primary file server). Thinking I was being clever, I attached a backup clone of the data partition from that VM to a different server and shared it out from there. Unfortunately, this is where I look stupid. I did not attach a backed up copy of the VHD, I attached the VHD itself, while the VM was attempting to absorb the snapshot. I didn't realize what I had done until the snapshot reconciled and I tried to launch the VM. I disconnected the VHD from the other server and tried again. Now I am getting an error message because, of course, the CID's don't match up.
I know what I did wrong, and I have admitted it. After the proverbial beating about the head and shoulders, can I get someone in the community with more common sense than I have to help me fix this? I have attached the 3 .vmdk files in the chain, and the relevent vmware.log file.
Thank you, and my God bless you and your kin.
Greg