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jamescarson69Flag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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ESXi snapshot deletion stuck at 99%

Hi

I have an ESXi 5 server which hosts two windows servers.

One server crashed yesterday as we ran out of disk space. This is an Exchange server which has vmdk file of around 500Gb.

Now the major issue is a few months ago someone took a snapshot and it has been forgotten about.
the snap shot 000001.vmdk file is a whopping 420Gb file.

One of my colleagues started the snap shot commit yesterday at 15:36 gmt - some 18 hours ago

The snapshot delete is stuck on 99%

The free disk space is 16Gb

I am working remotely and the SSH has not been enabled.


So all in all this is a very precarious situation.

I am trying to formulate a plan for best way forward - any tips from some experts would be greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance
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IanTh
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to my mind you need to extend the datastore

the snapshot resides in the same area as the vmdk

can you delete the old snapshot
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No room to extend - unless I can plug in an external drive and extend on to this?

Have not deleted the snapshot - it is (i hope) still committing

My issue is I can not ssh in so I have no way of know what is actually happening - The information within vsphere client is very limited

One thing I would like to know is regarding the vmdk files.

I have the orginal vmdk file and the snapshot 000001.vmdk file

when applying a snapshot, should I not see another vmdk file?
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Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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The process is still running - it is a mail server and we do have an dual delivery system setup for now

The vm was powered off before we started the merge

Can we shrink the unused space doing the V2V conversion?

Thanks in advance
hi hanccocka

I am looking at the vmconvertor option

However the snapshot commit process is still running

Will the conversion work?
what technology under pins the datastore, e.g. RAID 1, SATA etc

performance of the datastore will also determine the speed of merge.

With a V2V you have complete control of the sizes of disks on restore.
I would not complete a V2V at the same time as a Snapshot Merge, too much pressure on the datastore, you will impact the merge performance.
It is raid 1+0

The commit finished in 26-27 hours - patience is a virtue

My colleague who is now looking into this says that the drive still does not have much space

Is it possible that the snapshot vmdk has been committed but the original file has not been deleted?
Yes, Execellent that you were patient, most cancel fiddle, make the situation worse.

So well done for that.

Check the datastore, upload a screenshot here to confirm, check your snapshots in future, because performance is degraded running on a snapshot.

We would recommend having at least 20% free on your datastore
Great help from hanccocka. Patience was needed and he reaffirmed this for me.