VMware: Cannot delete virtual machine from disk with more then 100 active snapshots
Today I tried to delete a virtual machine with more then 100 (damn Backup Exec) snapshots, in the vSphere Client I selected in the inventory: “Delete from disk” , few seconds later I received this error message:
Cannot complete the operation due to an incorrect request to the server
Events directly at the vSphere 5.0 host:
Warning message from ESXHOST: This virtual machine has more than 100 redo logs in a single branch of its snapshot tree. Deleting some of the snapshots or consolidating the redo logs will improve performance. The maximum number of redo logs supported is 255.
Virtual machine disks consolidation failed.
Solution:
With this simple PowerCLI command I was able to remove the virtual machine include all active snapshots
Remove-VM "VM" -DeletePermanently -Confirm:$false
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I ran into this same issue from another backup solution left unattended. This is good info if you want to delete the vm. Otherwise you’ll likely need to cold clone the disk using vmkfstools -i