Hello,
Sorry for the long silence, it took some time to discuss and agree options with the business.
In fact the VM (a MS SQL server) in trouble has 5 disks.
4, disks in total 2 TB on one VMFS
And 1 disk of 2 TB on another VMFS
We were alerted by the 2 TB disk, consuming almost all available space on a 3,5 TB VMFS.
But also the other 4 disks were filling up disk space very quickly.
Also the console was not aware of the 5 snapshots, reporting no snapshots.
We discussed the following options:
- Deleting snapshots (will VM survive and running low on disk space?)
- Create a clone
- Rebuilding server
We proceeded as follows.
- The 2 TB disk was a backup disk for storage of DB dumps and transaction logs.
- We shipped dumps and logs temporarily to a smaller file share on another server.
- Deleted the 2 TB disk and snapshots, freeing up enough space for a clone
- Agreed a maintenance windows with the business
- Created a clone
The clone was successful, except that all disks kept the name of the 5th snapshot, something like “VM_1-000005.vmdk”
This is very confusing. Virtual disk files were renamed following KB http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1002491
After freeing up disks space by deleting the original VM, the clone will be moved to its original storage and a 5th disk will be added.
Thank you all for your contributions.