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Jason_McElvoy
Contributor
Contributor

Consolidate Helper- 0 Snapshot

For some reason the last 1-2 weeks, I've been noticing snapshots on several of my VM's named Consolidate Helper- 0.  I run VizionCore's vReplicator and if there is an open snapshot, the replication job will not run.  Yesterday morning I verified that none of my VM's had a snapshot, but last night 13 of my vReplicator jobs failed due to the VM's having open snapshots.  The size of the Consolidate Helper- 0 snapshot on all VM's is 0.0MB.  What is creating these snapshots and is there a way I can prevent them from being created?

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idle-jam
Immortal
Immortal

have a look at this http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003302

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Jason_McElvoy
Contributor
Contributor

How much free space is required/recommended? I have this happening on 13 servers spread out over 4 different volumes on my SAN. All 4 volumes are 2TB in total size with less than 500GB free on all 4.

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

It looks like it's not a disk space issue with that amount of free disk space. Usually the Helper snapshots are created during snapshot consolidation and should be deleted automatically. Do you see any errors in the vmware.log files of the VM's with the helper snapshots?

André

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Jason_McElvoy
Contributor
Contributor

Is the only way to get the logs for the vm's through the ESX Host?  There's no way to pull them from vSphere?

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

You can download the vmware.log files using the datastore browser. Depends whether or not they are currently in use.

André

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Jason_McElvoy
Contributor
Contributor

When attempting to download the vmware.log file, I got the error message:

Expected put message. Got:ERROR

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

This may happen if the file is in use. To be able to download it you would have to shutdown the VM. However, since you mentioned this happened for 1-2 weeks now, you may find a hint in one of the older log files which are not in use anymore.

André

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