Don’t know if anyone noticed it or not but with the latest set of patches VMware changed the “Delete All” mechanism that is part of the Snapshot feature. I wrote multiple articles about the “Delete All” functionality as it often led to completely filled up VMFS volumes when someone used without knowing the inner workings. Source When using the Delete [...]

Henry Robinsson, a product manager at VMware, just posted a topic on the VMTN community forums requestion feedback on VMware snapshots. (Thanks William Lam for pointing this out) I am uncertain what this feedback will lead into but usually it is used as guidance for the direction a specific product or feature is heading into. If you want to be [...]

As some already noticed; when creating a snapshot on a VM with two disks the block size of the VMFS volume which hold the working directory is checked before the snapshot is taken. As reported by VMTN User Pizang this was not the case in ESX 3.x. You can imagine that this can cause issues when the second disk of [...]

I was just reading this excellent KB article on consolidating snapshots. It really contains a wealth of information and a procedure on how to remove a snapshot of a disk that has been changed in size for instance. if the disk has been changed in size the following error will show up during the boot process of the VM: The [...]

I was reading Jason Boche’s blog on snapshots yesterday and noticed a misunderstanding. I tweeted Jason about this and his blog was updated in a sec. But I thought it might be handy to actually outline the basics again especially because during the VMTN Experts Podcast there was a huge discussion on snapshots. Unfortunately I could not join the call [...]

Team Fusion wrote a great post on “defragging” vm’s and why you shouldn’t do it. Or at least be very careful about it. Make sure to read it! Before we begin, it’s important to note that defragmentation isn’t a necessary task – your virtual machine will still work just fine even if you never defrag, and the effects of fragmentation [...]

If you just upgraded to 3.5 Update 2 and updated VMware tools and want to use VSS for snapshotting than you will have to enable this manually for each VM: In the VMware Tools installer, select Modify > Drivers > VSS. Complete the installation process. Restart the virtual machine to make sure VSS components are installed and running.