• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

  • Home
  • ESXTOP
  • Stickers/Shirts
  • Privacy Policy
  • About
  • Show Search
Hide Search

I discovered .PNG files on my datastore, can I delete them?

Duncan Epping · Sep 26, 2019 · 1 Comment

I noticed this question on Reddit about .PNG which were located in VM folders on a datastore. The user wanted to remove the datastore from the cluster but didn’t know where these files were coming from and if the VM required those files to be available in some shape or form. I can be brief about it, you can safely delete this .PNG files. These files are typically created by VM Monitoring (part of vSphere HA) when a VM is rebooted by VM Monitoring. This is to ensure you can troubleshoot the problem potentially after the reboot has occurred. So it takes a screenshot of the VM to for instance capture the blue screen of death. This feature has been in vSphere for a while, but I guess most people have never really noticed it. I wrote an article about it when vSphere 5.0 was released and below is the screenshot from that article where the .PNG file is highlighted. For whatever reason I had trouble finding my own article on this topic so I figured I would write a new one on it. Of course, after finishing this post I found the original article. Anyway, I hope it helps others who find these .PNG files in their VM folders.

Oh, and I should have added, it can also be caused by vCloud Director or be triggered through the API, as described by William in this post from 2013.

Share it:

  • Tweet

Related

Server ha, high availability, screenshot, vm monitoring, vsphere ha

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Davoud Teimouri says

    26 September, 2019 at 17:59

    Usually, PNG file captured from black screen! 😀

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Primary Sidebar

About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007) and the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive" and the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series.

Upcoming Events

04-Mar-21 | Polish VMUG – Roadshow
09-Mar-21 | Austria VMUG – Roadshow
16-Mar-21 | VMUG Turkey – Roadshow
18-Mar-21 | St Louis Usercon Keynote
26-Mar-21 | Hungary VMUG – Roadshow
08-Apr-21 | VMUG France – Roadshow

Recommended reads

Sponsors

Want to support us? Buy an advert!

Advertisements

Copyright Yellow-Bricks.com © 2021 · Log in