Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of Darrell Kirby
Darrell KirbyFlag for United States of America

asked on

Vmware Virtual Guest Datastore Space

I have a gust that crashed due to it being out of space. The Gust points to a 1TB datastore that ran out of space. The guest will not come back up due to being out of space. Is there something I can do to delete files from the volume?
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland image

Why did it run out of space?

Do you have any Snapshots active in Snapshot Manager?

If so how large and how long have you been running on the Snapshot?
Avatar of Darrell Kirby

ASKER

I have attached a screenshot of what my datastore looks like. I do not have a snapshot for this DS. Is anything in the DS able to be deleted? How would I get to the data on the VMDK to delete some files?
Virtual-Space.docx
It is VSphere 4.5. The space was consumed by data from the user. The OS was showing more space than Vmware was showing.
Looks like a snapshot to me!

Check in Snapshot Manager, if there is a snapshot?

You've not changed memory on the VM recently?
I have not changed any memory. When I look at snapshot it asks me if I want to revert to current Snapshot.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Yes. This VM is using the entire Datastore.
Snapshot has been running since the 13 February 2011.

It could take many hours to delete this, and it may not delete.

What is the server, and what are the sizes of the disks in properties.
Okay, this is a very large VM, you will need to create a new datastore on new disks
(is this possible on the server you have?)


or

Do you have vCenter? (you could clone this disk to another datastore, this would  get you out of Snapshot hell, and then, later delete the old VM (current one, after making clone).

or

use VMware Converter to Convert and MIgrate the data. (this is the recommended VMware way of getting out of Snapshot hell).

The Server is a File server. The disk size is 940GB (Thick)
It says MKS datastore only, do you have others?
Yes. I have other datastores. None that have enough space for this.
yes, you've got the largest Snapshot I've ever seen!

3G and 115GB.
what are the total sizes of the disks?

does it have two disks?

is it just one single 940GB disk?
do you have any space, anywhere, that you could use temp?
I am in the process of deleting all Snapshots.
Yes. it is a SAN.
Deleteing the Snapshot could fail, if you've not got enough disk space.

or do you mean on other datastores, so you can move it?

Do you have no other resource, disks or LUNs you can create to offer more space?
SOLUTION
Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Thank you for that information. The snapshot is at 99% and is taking some time which i am told is normal for large snapshots.
Yes, it could take a while to delete (merge the snapshot into the main vmdk disk).

Just keep an eye on the space on the datastore.
Oh yeah...with the size snaps we're talking about here, don't expect them to be finished anytime soon. Just monitor things a while and let us know if you run into issues...

~coolsport00
It took 4 hours to selete the snapshot! I wil turn this off for this machine. Thank you!
Actually didn't take as long as I thought it would :) Kudos to you for having patience...many EE posters that have snapshot/datastore 'free space' issues wanna rush the process.

Best of luck!

Regards,
~coolsport00
The deletion of the snapshot freed some space in order to get the machine back online.
That's pretty quick! Try not to use and leave snapshots running in future!