ntfs corruption after deleting snapshots

[jparnell]

Has anyone ever had ntfs corruption after deleting vmware esx snapshots? We had a chain of 5 snapshots. I deleted two of them a few days ago, and a few hours after we started receiving errors in the event log on the server "The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume C:". I ran a chkdsk and this fixed the corrupt files.

I then deleted the rest of the snapshots, and again, we started receiving ntfs errors. Again, a chkdsk fixed it.

This is all rather worrying. I'm starting to lose confidence in vm snapshots!

[oreeh]

Has anyone ever had ntfs corruption after deleting vmware esx snapshots?

I never had this problem.

Was the machine running while committing the snapshots?

What type of VM is it / what applications are running in this VM?

[jparnell]

Yes, machine was running - this should be ok though shouldn't it?

Its Windows 2003 SP2, and has Oracle installed. Oracle was down whilst commiting them.

Seemingly random files were corrupted - some in my profile, some windows update backups.

[oreeh]

Yes, machine was running - this should be ok though shouldn't it?

Yes, this is ok.

[jguzmanr]

I've had the same problem....I've opened a case with vmware...let's see what they come up with.

Your vm, was it a p2v? What esx build are you running?

[jparnell]

The virtual machine is a clean install - it's always been a VM.

We're running 3.0.2

More worryingly is that our database team like to use snapshots to test different things and they are now complaining about oracle database corruption in some of our databases where they have used vm snapshots. I've advised them to shutdown the database whilst taking and deleting snapshots.

[fdapra]

I had the same problem on two VM.

We solved the problem with this patch from microsoft.

I hope this help

Fabrizio

[dascott]

Hi,

About 6 weeks ago, we experienced random Oracle DB instances terminating themselves unexpectedly during snapshot creation as part of an overnight scheduled VCB backup.

VMware support advised us that the VMTools SYNC Driver should be disabled on all high I-O VMs (including SQL, Oracle, Exchange servers, etc).

They recommended following the procedure outlined in one of their KB articles and we have not experienced Oracle problems during VCB backups since following their advice.

Unfortunately, we are currently experiencing NTFS corruption on a Windows 2003 VM which happened several hours after deleting 2 snapshots.

INTERESTINGLY the VM suffering with NTFS corruption has the Sync Driver enabled...

perhaps as suggested by a previous poster, the Sync Driver does indeed cause more problems than it solves?