consolidate needed, but doesn't work

[Andy_32]

Hi, 

 

I hope this is the correct location to post this...

I have an ESXi server with one virtual machine.  There are no snapshots visible. However, I have a .vmdk disk that currently has multiple versions: shares-000002.vmdk, server-shares-000001.vmdk and server-shares.vmdk. Which seem to indicate that somehow an old snapshot was not consolidated properly. The ESXi Host client shows the message "This virtual machine needs to have its disks consolidated. You should consolidate disks to improve performance and optimize disk utilization. ".

I tried consolidate through the webinterface ESXi Host Client, but this runs for a while and reports 'Completed successfully" after a while but the multiple version of the file remain in place.

I tried a suggestion I found to create a new snapshot and then delete it in the hopes of this fixing the issue, but this only resulted in the creation of yet another vmdk file (the 000002 version). As this is taking up incredible amounts of diskspace and my server is running out of it, I hope someone can point me in the right direction for a solution. 

I've checked the .vmdk files and they are indeed linked (parentid), so I can't just delete the older two. 

I was thinking to download the entire virtual machine using VMWare workstation and when finished to reupload the server-shares.vmdk to the ESXi server. Would this solve the problem? Or only increase it?

On this same ESXi server I have two datastorages, one large one where I have this issue, and a smaller currently unused one of about 250GB. I have (or should have) 2 vmdk files, one the problematic shares.vmdk and another server.vmdk which contains the OS of this virtual machine. I would like to move (while the virtual machine is shut down of course) the server.vmdk (+/- 40GB) to the other datastorage to make some extra free space. Do I just have to move the server.vmdk to the other datastorage using the ESXi Host client? Or do I need to also move the server.vmsd file? Any other changes needed for the virtual machine to start correctly?

best regards,

Andy

 

 

[Andy_32]

ok, I've moved all server.* files to the empty datastorage using the ESXi web client, unregistered my virtual machine, reregistered it, then removed the shares-whatever disk from the virtual machine settings (since it now resides on another datastorage than the operating system disk) re-added that disk (all using the web client). Started up the virtual machine and now the virtual machine starts up again, with about 40GB free space on datastorage2. 

 

The consolidation issue remains. I'll download the shares-*.vmdk files to a desktop computer this weekend and using  QEMU try to merge the whole thing in one .vmdk file and re-upload it. If it doesn't work, I'll just remove it, recreate a virtual disk and then put the data back on it from my backupfiles.