Fail to Take Snapshot - File already exists

[LondonD]

I'm trying to take a snapshot on a VM and receive a "file already exists issue"

If I look at the VMs folder structure there are no -0000.vmdk which i guess means there is no snapshots.

I do however see a lot of vmsn files, probably 20 of them.

NetBackup fails this VM every night, so that is how I picked up the snapshot cannot be created

Please help

[PduPreez]

There could be a few reasons why snapshots do not take place.

Here is a link to more info on how Snapshots works.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=101518...

The vmsn file contains the VMs Memory state at the time of snapshot.

This file gets created when the snapshot fails as well, so it looks like this VM has 20 failed snapshot attempts.

Dis this VM have snapshots before, and did anyone manually remove them?

regards

[LondonD]

Thanks for the info.

I did scan through the document but it is still not clear why the snapshot fails.

Dis this VM have snapshots before, and did anyone manually remove them?

Yes the backups was working fine on this VM before this issue started.

I am not sure what has been done on this VM since the issue occured, because I just took the problem over to try and get it resolved.

Any Help will be appreciated

[PduPreez]

The fact that there is no snapshot vmdk files -0000.vmdk as you mentioned, it means you could easily fix this VM by just creating a new VM and point to the old vmdks.And this will meen downtime.

But before you do that is there any other snapshot related files in your VMFS folder. If you compare it to another VM with no snapshots what files differ?

[LondonD]

As mentioned there are all these .vmsn files, but I did notice there is a XXXXXXXXXXX-000002-delta.vmdk.

This file is not in use, because if i look at edit settings, the 2 vdisks points to the correct vmdk's

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.vmdk

and

XXXXXXXXXXXX_1.vmdk

[PduPreez · Accepted solution]

I believe the Delta file is the issue. Durning a snapshot creation this file is created, after deletion this file should be gone.

So when it tries to create this file during snapshot, it sees it already exist and hence give the error "file exist"

Somehow this file got left behind, but you can safely delete this file and also all the vmsn files.

regards

Please award points if you find this helpful/correct :smileycool:

[LondonD]

Excellent. I deleted those files and retried to take a snapshot and delete it. All working 100%

Thanks allot!