Cannot clone VM from vCenter

[eoindubh]

As we are a software R&D site and work with all the latest Microsoft stuff, particularily Sharepoint, our VMs are getting to be quite large. I ran into an issue this morning where I cannot create a clone of a VM because the snapshot part fails because of low disk space. It loks like the snapshot is being created on my local C drive which "only" has 60GB of free space. The VM is 80GB.

Is there a way to make the process use another disk during the clone process? I have 3TB of storage on other drives available.

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

[James Bowling]

Do you have enough space on the datastore that this VM resides on?

[eoindubh]

There is 431.97GB free space on the datastore that the VM is running on.

[James Bowling]

Just wondering but do you have this problem if you clone the VM while it is powered off?

[satishchirala]

when ever u r cloning the vm , u will get options use thick option select that and create , it will create the machine which is having data

suppose vm =80 gb disk free is =60 gb while creating cloning select thin then it will take 25gb .try it have have sucess with good news!!!!!!!!

[eoindubh]

I am using thin provisioning. The original VM was not.

I do not have the option of shutting down the VM. As we are a 24/7/365 operation I have to get approval from a couple of different departments to shut down anything.

[eoindubh]

I worked out the problem. The corporate DBA setup a SQL backup to disk on C that was sucking up over 1/2GB per day and ate up all the space on C. I have deleted all but the last week and he is configuring the backup to keep a max of a couple of weeks. System is back to normal.

[satishchirala]

if the vm has snapshots means ,i won't clone when the vm is powered on stage

[eoindubh]

The VM did not have any snapshots. The problem was low disk space on the vCenter caused by SQL backups. Deleteing most of them cured the problem.