I have come across a number of environments where mystery “snapshot” files exist - they are not seen in snapshot manager, running a consolidation them doesn’t help, creating a snapshot (with memory, or guest OS quiescing) then running “Delete All” doesn’t resolve it, but some applications still think a snapshot is there. To take care of these is quite a manual process after you have followed all the VMware KB advice: ...
Recently had a problem were Veeam was giving bother on one VM that had a dedicated datastore, not allowing hot-add virtual appliance mode to work. I originally thought it was a problem with CBT (changed block tracking) so I disabled that, with no luck, as it transpires there were a few (all datastore formatting related) problems: The Veeam proxy’s datastore was formatted in VFMS-3 with a 2MB block size and upgraded to VMFS-5 (retaining its 2MB block size of course - otherwise a reformat would be needed). The source machine’s datastore was formatted in VMFS-3 with an 8MB block size and later upgraded to VMFS-5 (retaining its 8MB block size). The target datastore was formatted in VMFS-5 natively with a unified 1MB block size. So when the proxy tries to hot-add the disk the VMFS block size on the source machine’s datastore is larger than the proxy’s datastore block size and the hot-add fails. ...
Introduction Some things should be simple, shrinking a thin provisioned virtual disk should be one of them, it’s not. N.B. This will just reduce the VMDK’s usage on the VMFS datastore NOT resize the “provisioned size” of a thin disk. To shrink a VMDK we can use an ESX command line tool vmkfstools, but first you have to zero out any free space on your thin provisioned disk. Windows On Windows guests we can use the sysinternals tool SDelete ↗ (replace the [DRIVE:] with the relevant Windows drive letter) you must use v1.6 or later!: ...