Vmware how long to delete a snapshot

After that it's good old diskpart in Windows and your hard drive is bigger. No problems so far. I did this exact procedure on one of our old virtualized file servers and it worked fine. I took the snapshot of that VM before enlarging the disk but still have the snapshot. Now it is a few weeks later and I need to enlarge that hard drive again. Cant do it with an active snapshot.

How do I reconcile or get rid of that snapshot? The server is running fine and I think I just need to somehow click the right thing to make this snapshot go away? The teacher in my VMWare class scared us off snap shots because he said the buttons Delete and Go To dont do exactly what you think they do. If you're happy with the VM and just want to carry on running it as it is now, "Delete All" should be all you need. If it's been a few weeks be prepared for it to take a very long time.

It's been 5 days. I gave them another Gig about 5 days ago. They ate it all and want more. I'll probably do this late at night after the backups finish and no one is off the system. I read all the manuals and help files. Just scared to screw it up and wanted clarification. Update: just also found out that this server is the only one that "Needs Consolidation". Should I consolidate before delete all? I've never encountered that issue so I don't know for sure, but the implication is that you need to follow this:.

They are doing this because of the snapshots. And yeah delete them if you don't need them. Snapshots should rarely be taken on a production server. It screws your datastore by using the resources. Delete the snapshot if you want your machine to stay at its current state. Go To a snapshot if you want to "undo" your changes.

What you are basically doing with the snapshot is making a copy of the drive. That copy then is becoming the current drive and the old snapshot you had would be saved. So you basically have two drives at this point on the datastore. When you consolidate them it is going to merge all of them together and will take a fair amount of time depending on the size of the drive.

This also depends on the amount that the data actually changed too. Justin is right on with the deleting. If you delete the snapshots you will go back to the original and lose all of that data changes from time x to time y.

You want to consolidate or you will lose data. Deleting the snapshot gets rid of the logical point in time state, so you won't be able to go back. That's what you need to do. And if you have to wait until after hours, then your SAN wasn't sized correctly. What does it all mean? One of life's great questions I emailed several of my colleagues about this a while back, and I think most of the information still applies:.

VMware is a very powerful virtualization product, with many features that aren't available in a traditional server implementation.

One advantageous feature is the use of snapshots. Before making a big change to a virtual machine, you can take a snapshot. Then, if something goes terribly wrong, all you have to do is revert the snapshot to restore the VM to its original state. However, there are a few items to note regarding the use of snapshots: - Snapshots aren't intended to be kept long-term. Take a snapshot before making a change; if the change works, remove the snapshot and commit any changes to the original parent disk.

If the child disks grow too large, it's only a matter of time before their associated VMs run into serious issues. This illustrates the previous point of not keeping snapshots long-term. Given this fact, if you plan to clone a VM for troubleshooting, make sure it doesn't have any snapshots before you clone it.

After you understand snapshots a bit more, the following articles may prove useful. Sorry I must be having a Monday moment. You can delete those based on the "you are here" I guess I could use this and set the size to something reasonable. What Version of ESXi are you on?

Nimble and some others let you offload snapshots to the array. This makes things faster This is some cool stuff. Brand Representative for Veeam Software. To continue this discussion, please ask a new question. Get answers from your peers along with millions of IT pros who visit Spiceworks.

Best Answer. Pure Capsaicin. Gary D Williams This person is a verified professional. Verify your account to enable IT peers to see that you are a professional. View this "Best Answer" in the replies below ».

Popular Topics in Data Backup. Which of the following retains the information it's storing when the system power is turned off?

Submit ». Phil Aug 6, at UTC. I hit the delete snapshot and as soon as I did I thought I probably should have turned it off. It has moved from 33 to 37 after about 7 hrs.

The good news is that it's my veeam box and all jobs are halted so their will be few IO's and there are only two other vm's on this san and they have very little io. There are 3 vmdks on this vm and it looks like one has consolidated and it working on a GB delta disk now. The other one is about a TB so Im pretty confident I'll be watching it consolidate for the next few days. On a side note, I will be setting up alarms for snapshots: Hopefully I can trigger the alarm based on hours on a snap since veeam will be creating them daily.

Phil wrote: On a side note, I will be setting up alarms for snapshots: Hopefully I can trigger the alarm based on hours on a snap since veeam will be creating them daily. My post was more generic information vs doing so now it's started.

StorageNinja This person is a verified professional. You can power off the VM from inside the guest OS.