VMware Horizon Community
DSJordan
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Delete snapshots from Instant Clone Master Image

Hello!

A client pushes a new instant clone image weekly to a pool of instant clones.  When I delete older snapshots, VCenter (or PowerCLI) respond almost instantly that it was successful.  It does remove the snapshot from the list of snapshots, however it does not really remove the vmdks for the snapshot.  It behaves this way very consistently.

Only the 2 most recent snapshots are really in use.  I suspect, however, that Horizon and/or VCenter have a lock on the older snapshots.

Is there a proper way to delete older snapshots?  If I disable the pool, can I delete the older snapshots?  If disabling the pool enables that to work, do I need to wait a few minutes for the locks to release before deleting the snapshots?

Now that the older snapshots no longer show up in VCenter, is there a good way to delete them without cloning the VM and losing the other snapshots?

Thanks!

Scott

Reply
0 Kudos
3 Replies
mchadwick19
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

This has been an issue for me as well and it has always been recommended (to me) to clone the master to completely clean up the snapshots.

I would like to know if it's okay to remove the old VMDK's that are no longer part of the snapshot chain or if there is a way to force disk consolidation. On a regular VM you would get the option the consolidate by this point but it doesn't seem to happen on View gold images.

VDI Engineer VCP-DCV, VCP7-DTM, VCAP7-DTM Design
Reply
0 Kudos
DSJordan
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I think removing the older snapshots from the chain would be a pain.  Smiley Sad

I've dealt with it in two ways:

1.  I have a script to delete the pool, delete all snapshots, then rebuild the pool.  Not ideal.  Especially since I like to keep the last few snapshots around...just in case I need them.

2. Copy the master image (from the last snapshot).  Push a new image from the copy of the master.  After a while the locks get released from the master image and the snapshots can be deleted as usual.  Push a new image from the master (non-copy) image.

I fiddled with it some, but disabling the pool never worked for me.  I was hoping that if the pool was disabled (perhaps for a certain amount of time), the locks would be released from the snapshots.

I was just hoping someone had found a trick.  Thanks for the reply!

Scott

Reply
0 Kudos
FerducarVmware
Contributor
Contributor

We open a SR with vmware and there workaround was to clone the golden imge, I think the only solution is to first delete the desktop pool, then delete the snapshots and the vmdks will be deleted as well, finally recreate the desktop pool, I will try this and lets see what happens.

Reply
0 Kudos