Still confused about snapshots - delete or consolidate?

[MichaelLeone]

I use snapshots so rarely, I find I am confused. I have a VM that has a snapshot from a long time ago (like 10 months ago ...). I want to get rid of it, to reclaim the space. I won't need to revert back; the way the VM is running and configured now is acceptable to my developer. This particular VM does not show a "Needs consolidate" setting, in the list of VMs for this ESXi 5.1 host, so I don't think I need to "Consolidate". There is only the one snapshot showing in Snapshot Manager.

When I search for "delete snapshot" in the VMware knowledgebase, it tells me that a "Delete" will do a consolidation, then remove the snapshot. That sounds like what I want. But what then is the difference between "Delete" and "Consolidate"? Does "Consolidate" not delete the snapshot afterwards?

In my situation, what should I be doing? I think I need to "Delete"; this will get rid of the snapshot but leave my VM in the state it is in now. Is that correct? (Also, I would do this with the VM powered off, as the snapshot file is like 35G in size now, and I know that a delete or consolidate will take a really long time with a snapshot this back). We're going to be migrating all our datastores from our current HP SAN to a new Dell SAN, so I want to clean up any snapshots now.

Thanks

[admin · Accepted solution]

Hello Michael,

Actually consolidate and delete to the same operation they commit the re-do logs - ie the changes made while the VM was running on the snapshot to the base disks.

consolidate - commits the data to base disk and removes the snapshot

Delete - commit the data to the base disk and removed the snapshots files.

Remove - removes the snapshot but does not commit the data to base disk.

The only reason why consolidate option was added in ESX 5.0 and later versions was many assumed that delete option would remove the files and does not commit the data.

But on the actual scenario it did. Just to avoid this VMware came up with consolidate. what consolidate does on background is it it takes another snapshot and performs the delete all operation.Hope this clarifies the confusion.

And In your situation you should be doing delete all.

Thanks,

Avinash

[admin]

There is a discussion about the snapshot which you can find here.. https://communities.vmware.com/thread/460542

~dGeorgey

[proden20]

You want to delete the snapshot.  "Delete" is synonymous with "commit."

Consolidation handles situations where the vSphere administrator (or a backup program) tried to delete (aka "commit") a snapshot, but for some reason the system was unsuccessful in doing so.  When this happens, the VM will keep running from the snapshot and the snapshot will continue to grow. In addition, you would no longer see the snapshot in the Snapshot Manager, but still see snapshot files stored with the VM when you browse the datastore.  The administrator can use "consolidate now" to clean up the orphaned snapshot tree and bring the VM up-to-date, running from only its base disks.

[MichaelLeone]

Thanks all. I did the "DELETE ALL" last night. It took a while, as the delta disk was something like 35G in size. 🙂 But it looks like it all worked correctly.