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Omnicom
Contributor
Contributor

Can I remove the out.file file?

Hi all!

I see on the SAN attached to our 2 VMware hosts that there is a 16GB large out.file file. This file has a modified-date of about 1.5 years ago (both servers have been rebooted since then).

Can I safely remove this file?

Regards,

Evert Meulie

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wila
Immortal
Immortal

Hi,

That's a pretty strange file. It is not a file normally used by VMware virtual machines, I would suspect that it is created by someone for some troubleshooting purposes, but if you don't know or if the person who created it is not around anymore then it can become a tricky question.

If it is a file that is part of some configuration file somewhere it might be expected to exist, so just deleting it can have detrimental effects.

Instead of just plain deleting the file there are a few things you could do.

If you are savvy on the command line then you could take a peek at what the file actually contains and see if that helps pinpointing the problem.

If not, then still no problem, but instead of just deleting the file, I would start by renaming it.

Then after a while if no-one reported any problems anywhere and if all your VMs have been rebooted you could safely delete the file knowing that you didn't break anything.

Hope this helps,



--

Wil

_____________________________________________________

VI-Toolkit & scripts wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
Omnicom
Contributor
Contributor

I suspect it to be some kind of memory dump, since it's the same size (16GB) as the RAM in either of our VM-hosts.

I have renamed it now, and nothing has crashed yet... Will delete it next week.

Greetings,

Evert

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