We recently switched back to using Linked Clones in most of our pools. We currently have 3 pools that are Instant Clones but i show about 14 templates, replicas, and parents. I located which ones are valid and which are not but not sure the correct way to remove them. Can i go to each host and remove them there is that a bad thing to do. I seen the maintenance commands but not sure about how to remove them. Any help is appreciated. Thanks
Perry
Sorry I forget about that limitation. Yes, I've done it multiple times, but you can't delete them till they are unprotected.
The utilities are here
Instant-Clone Maintenance Utilities
Are you removing all of the pools? If so just run the unprotect command and deleted all of them, if not you need to isolate which ones are which. If you create a resource pool and push a new image to the pool, the cp- vms will show up in the same locations as the clones. Then you can isolate the correct ones and delete them
You can't delete them though until the command is ran, if you can they are probably orphaned and need to be deleted anyway.
i am not deleting all of them. I currently have 3 pools of instant clones but i have about 14 parents, replicas and templates showing up invCenter. Just looking to get rid of those 10 stray parent, replicas, and templates. I think that that the IcUnprotect file will remove them but not sure about a couple things. Is the instant clone client ID the one that appears in vcenter or is that a different number? On that same line, is the parent name that shows up? i.e. cp-parent-..............
Unprotect just allows you to manually delete them , normally the option to delete them is grayed out. I have my pools in resource groups like I mentioned before and the names don't tie to that id. Here is an example
There is one cp-template file that gets cloned to the cp-replica, then the cp-replica is cloned to the cp-parent files, then finally the cp-parents are forked to each clone. I'm personally not aware of a easy way to identify them, other then pushing the ones you need into resource pools, and deleting any of them that don't show up there. You may be able to look in the adsi editor and look ldap database to see where the links there, but so far I've never done that or seen anyone do that yet.
We've always applied notes to our parents since it will be added to the replica on linked clones for easy identification. Does that not work with instant clones?
Super6VCA I'm curious why you are moving from instant clones back to linked clones?
The biggest reason is login time. In out environment we could not get UEM and Appvol to work well with it and login times were about 40 seconds. I hated going back.
I just tried this since I never noticed the actions option, it defaults to unprotect. You can run it in detect mode and get something similar to below which may help, as you see I have a few that i need to clean up, I'll probably verify these, but a quick looks they do like they may have been left over from a push. I'm doing updates in a few weeks again and will run this later and see if it changes since I should get a new set.
Sjesse,
I only have one resource pool so i am not that lucky. cheap boss! So I did identify what needs to be removed. I was just curious if i was able to go into the Host and right click the item (parent, replica, or template) and delete them from disk. I have 15 cp-parents, 14 cp-replicas, and 12 cp-templates. Sounds odd but that's what they are. I have not removed anything at this point. Can I manually delete them without messing up the DB?
I don't mean a different cluster, I mean a vsphere resource pool
If you create one and then edit the pool , its in the vsphere settings
New vms will go in there, but to get the new cp template files there you need to push a new image
IF you have them identified you can delete them and the run the viewdbchk command if you want to verify everyhing is fine
Resolving Database Inconsistencies with the ViewDbChk Command
this does fix instant clone issues, there is a bug 7.4 has that I have to run this from time to time.
Thanks. My cluster and resource pool are one in the same. Standard edition 😞
So they can be delete from disk manually???
Sorry I forget about that limitation. Yes, I've done it multiple times, but you can't delete them till they are unprotected.
sjesse,
Thanks again for all the assistance. Really appreciate the replies. We are all good now. Thanks and take care!
Perry
Hey sjesse,
Could you please share the command that uses detect mode as below
We need to get some storage back on our datastores and I cant find the correct syntax
I would be very grateful
Many Thanks
Ian
When you push out a new image those should get cleaned up, its probably because you deleted or renamed the image those parents were based off of.
Thank you for replying sjesse.
I think we have lots of old data that has not been removed over a period of 2 years even after deleting the pools
The command that you have run on your earlier post is exactly what I am looking for.
If you could share i would appreciate it
Many Thanks
Ian