Use VMware Converter to Solve ESX Snapshot Issues
May 21st, 2008 | 
Author: Carlo Costanzo over at ipmer.com has a great post about how to quickly and easily solve issues resulting from VM snapshots. As Carlo points out, too many administrators misunderstand the ESX snapshot to be a point in time backup and unfortunately do not realize it is instead a live and growing file. More often than not the snapshot is forgotten until the LUN is completely out of space at which time the VM is unstable. Trying to commit the snapshot becomes a time consuming burden.
The post 70GB Snapshot, YIKES! explains how Carlo used some “outside of the box” thinking to use VMware Converter to rescue VMs without going through the commit process. The idea is so simple it’s brilliant! Carlo writes:
“I created an ISO of VMware Converter and uploaded it to my ESX Hosts and booted each of the affected Virtual Machines into the WinPE environment as if they were physical machines. From there, I just ‘converted’ them into new VMs in VirtualCenter. The process was very fast – a 20 GB VM took about 15 minutes and the result was an identical Virtual Machine without any troublesome snapshots associated with it. I did have to remove the USB drive virtual hardware that was added to the newly created VM. (I wish there was a way to select the virtual hardware for a P2V destination during the process to avoid these extra steps)
A couple of fast conversions later and the systems were in a stable state again and all the Production Virtual Machines were snapshot free!”
Of course you need available disk space for the “converted” VM, but even the ESX local storage will do as a temporary holding tank until you can delete the original problematic VMs. Removing one VM with a very large snapshot usually creates enough free space for multiple, snapshot-free VMs.
Check out the rest of Carlo’s post at the link above, and all of the other great virtualization content he is posting at ipmer.com.
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Posted in P2V, VirtualCenter, VirtualCenter, how to, virtualization, vmware, vmware converter | 
Tags: backup, disk space, esx, how to, issues, P2V, snapshot, storage, virtualcenter, virtualmachine, vmware, vmware converter
