Parent VM for Linked CLones

[Danooo]

Hi, I have a number of linked clones created by users in vCD. I have particular VM which I believe is a linked clone and I need to check their parent VM (master image). Does vCD allow me to check that in easy way or some third party script needs to be used?

Also I would like to check if this particular VM is linked clone of full, stand alone VM. How can I check that?

Any feedback will be appreciated.

Regards,

[IamTHEvilONE]

you can try the LCTree Fling.  It should give you what you are looking for, which disks/VMs a VM is based off of in a tree like format.  And it will notate the root node.

Lctree – VMware Labs

[Danooo]

Thanks,

According release notes this doesn't work with vCD 5.5. as my datastores are larger than 2TB. Also there is no info about 1.2 which would support vCD 5.5

[IamTHEvilONE]

I have seen it work with vCloud Director 5.5 ... but that's not a guarantee.

[IamTHEvilONE]

the other way would be parsing the VMDK header files to do this manually.

as a one off, this isn't so bad to do ... it's just a very long explanation to do over a forum.

something like this might do it: https://superuser.com/questions/624973/searching-virtual-machine-linked-clones-in-vmware-workstation

the formatting of linked clones is a header file (tiny file) then some secondary file that holds data.  the tiny file is plain text.

there is a line in the plain text showing the parent hint path, which is the next level parent.

repeat to locate the grandparent (if one exists)

if there is no parent hint, then there should be a -flat.vmdk mentioned in the header file.