VMWare old snapshot consolidation
I have been tasked to manage an old VMWare 4.0.1 installation, which is due to be replaced in the near future but it must be kept running at the moment.
I immediately noticed that some virtual machines have very old snapshots, some even taken years ago. I don't like to run with so old snapshots, as they reduce performance and use a fair amount of space (over 100 GB). On the other hand, I am somewhat concerned that consolidating these very old snapshots can cause some problems (ie: a failed consolidation leaving the vm image in an inconsistent state).
What do you feel is the best approach to get ridden of these old snapshots?
You're right that vSphere snapshots shouldn't sit around for long, we have a 48-hour maximum period, the facility is there to help with say software upgrades or similar. Clearing down old ones can be very slow and can corrupt the VM - but you need to do it, you can't leave these around can you? Presumably you want to upgrade the whole environment to 6.x, in which case you probably really need to get rid of those old snapshots so you can migrate them into vmfs v6 datastores.
Anyway yeah, get rid of them but warn people not to do this again and that you may lose some VMs.
- Create a backup of the VM files, ideally while it is powered off. Just copying the whole VM to a second location should suffice.
- Delete the snapshots. Ideally during non office hours, the consolidation will take time. A lot of time. It will go faster when the VM is turned off.
- Check if the VM is intact, if not, restore the backup.