Hello,
I come to you hoping to have better luck than with VMWare support.
Do you know why sometimes in some cases VMWare does not delete old SNAPSHOT files after disk consolidation?
We migrated our vms a few months ago, from datastore in VMFS 5 to VMFS 6, but since then we very regularly have orphan files.
This anomaly occurs on vms with a snapshot. The steps leading to these orphan files are as follows:
For example, we find for the vm below files orphaned for 4 days :
Name Folder Size CapacityKB Modification Owner Thin Extents DiskType |
Does anyone have any clues or an explanation, thank you in advance
Are you sure that the files are not in use? That would be quite unusual.
Even though the Snapshot Manager doesn't show any snapshots, there may be some!
Backup applications sometimes do not completely release the .vmdk files after the backup, which causes the snapshot deletion/consolidation to fail.
One option to ensure that the VM doesn't have active snapshots is the check the .vmdk file names in the VM's virtual disk settings.
How does your backup application do the backups? Does it use the API, or does it Hot-Add the VMs' virtual disk files to the backup server, or a backup proxy?
André
Hi,
Thank you for your reply,
On the Backup Application side, NetBackup only launches commands via the APIs to create and delete snapshots.
On the file side, yes these are indeed orphan files, this has been checked with VMWare support.
For my part, I regularly list them in Powercli with the "Get-VmwOrphan" function of lucD.
To delete these files I take my precautions, I perform a Storage vMotion of the vm and I delete all the files that have not migrated.
I insisted with the support for 1 month and I just learned that they escalated our ticket.......
>>> On the Backup Application side, NetBackup only launches commands via the APIs to create and delete snapshots.
Does NetBackup contain details about the reason for the failed deletion/consolidation in its log files, e.g. something like "Unable to access file xxx since it is locked"?
André