Delete a snapshot

[fafa24]

Hi All,

At our largest VM there is a leftover of a Veeam snapshot from January. The disk usage is 1.46TB. I assume to delete this snapshot will take quite a while and use heavy disk activity. I will do it in a off peak time.

My question: Is it okay to delete the snapshot while the VM is powered on and what do you think how long will it take? To take the VM offline is not really an option and I'm not sure the deletion process of the snapshot would be significantly faster.

Thanks,

Edy

[vijayrana968 · Accepted solution]

The required time is proportional to the amount of data the virtual machine is writing during consolidation if the virtual machine is powered on. If this VM has very high I/O then consolidating process can halt VM at last step. This is not mandatory but depend on size of VMDKs, VM's I/O and health/performance of storage.

I would suggest do this Powered off state as you said vmdk's size is large. But if you want to do in power on state then do it in off hours when there is no much activities on datastore and VM is less accessible.

[fafa24]

Thanks for your answer. This is helpful since I have never removed a snapshot for such a large VM.

[fafa24]

I removed the snapshot yesterday. It took 2 hours and I didn't power off the VM. It went very smoothly without any issue.

Thanks

[vijayrana968]

Nice :smileycheck: