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

Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Lead (Sr.) Consultant by UNICA ICT Solutions. Sander has over 15 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization and modern worksplace.
More Posts - Website
Follow Me:


This video details how to configure alarms in your VMware vSphere environment, through vCenter Server. It’s easy but not a default alarm..
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl0VmmKNhYk&feature=player_embedded
Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Lead (Sr.) Consultant by UNICA ICT Solutions. Sander has over 15 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization and modern worksplace.
More Posts - Website
Follow Me:


Today I got some problems with backing up one of my VM’s using VMware Data Recovery. I was looking what was going wrong after a few failures.. And yes.. hanging snapshots
Trying to remove the snapshots was a little bit different. When I went into the “Snapshot Manager” there were no active snapshots and I couldn’t delete the files. But while browsing the Datastore I saw many active snapshots.
Current situation:

– You can “Revert to Current Snapshot” via menu..

Read more…
Sander Daems is founder and author of this blog and working as a Lead (Sr.) Consultant by UNICA ICT Solutions. Sander has over 15 years experience in IT, primary focus: virtualization and modern worksplace.
More Posts - Website
Follow Me:


When Creating a snapshot for a virtual machine fails
Or you receive the error:
File is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore
Note: This error does not occur on ESX 3.5 or earlier.
ESX 4.0 is able to detect when a snapshot file at maximum size cannot fit into a datastore. Instead of allowing the file to be created, which may not work correctly if it grows to big, ESX cancels the operation and displays the above error.
To confirm if the snapshot files may be too big, compare the size of the virtual machine’s base disks against the block size of the datastore which contains the virtual machine’s working directory.
Note: If you are using Raw Device Map, you should compare the size of the RDMs instead of the base disks.
Read more…
To install vcb follow the instructions on this link.
The first time I came in contact with vcb I created some batch files to make vcb snapshots. I encountered all kind of problems. Snapshots that vcb didn’t remove. unexpected errors no vss support and some more issues.
To overcome some of these problems I created a vbs script vcbBackup.vbs. The full howto is comming soon for now only the code. Read more…
All snapshots are created in the default virtual machine directory. Even if the vmdk disk file is located on different datastore than the virtual machine, the delta files are created in the default virtual machine directory.
This article provides instructions to change the default location.
Changing the location of where the delta files are created is helpful if you need to:
- Create a snapshot but do not have enough space on the VMFS volume
- Power on a virtual machine but there is not enough space to create a swap file on the VMFS volume
To change the default location:
- Power off the virtual machine.
- Add the following line to the VMX configuration file for the virtual machine:
workingDir="<new_path_location>"
For example:
workingDir="/vmfs/volumes/46f1225f-552b0069-e03b-00145e808070/vm-snapshots"
- To reload virtual machine configuration, run the command:
# vimsh -ne "vmsvc/reload <VmId>"
When you power on the virtual machine, snapshot files and VSWP files are created in the new location.
Note: If you do not want to redirect the virtual machine’s swap file, add the following line to the VMX configuration file, then reload the configuration:
sched.swap.dir="<path_to_vm_directory>"
When you power on the virtual machine, the swap file is created in the same directory as virtual machine.
Recent Comments