Comments on: ESX: Recover from expanded disk with existing snapshot or corrupted snapshots

By: richard

richard — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 04:19:56 +0000

Happened to me again with vSphere4 last weekend. Phantom snapshot + fill disk. Add in the thin provisioning of vSphere4 and it is a disaster. No data lost -b ut about 24 hours of uptime was. Good thing this was a private internal testing server for – Zimbra – no less. Oh the poetry of it!

By: SilentLamb

SilentLamb — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 19:25:21 +0000

WOW! I cannot believe that VMWare 1) deliberately included a process that would fill the disk, inducing corruption 2) charges out the a$$ for their supposedly superior product and 3) has no simple means of recovering from this Bull$(*&

What F-TARD decided that this stupid “DELTA to drive capacity” idea was good one? How hard would it be to monitor the disk for storage space and force you to commit the changes once in a while or at least send a dang email??????

By: richard

richard — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:03:20 +0000

No problems. Glad it could help. You’d have thought that software that costs upwards of 35K USD for a 4 server cluster would:

A) Not have this problem

B) Have the issue clearly publicised and not kept for internal partner conferences!

Working on another one now for screwed storage vMotion tasks.

By: Wade

Wade — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 07:18:35 +0000

Bravo! I did not have the same problem that you had but I did have multiple snapshots that did not show up in the Snapshot manager. Renaming the .vmsd file, recreating it by making a snapshot and then deleting that snapshot deleted all previous snapshots. Your technique was substancially easy than any other one I found. Thank you for sharing!

By: Rafal

Rafal — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:30:30 +0000

It worked The OS is not bootable, but I was able to mount it to a different OS and copy the data. Good job.

By: Alessandro

Alessandro — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:24:38 +0000

Un grandissimo Thank!!!
Mi hai salvato.

You are the best…..

By: Sam King

Sam King — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:56:15 +0000

This is more of a reply to Serkan’s “VMControl error -11:No such virtual machine”. If you have several ESX servers sharing the same storage, make sure that you’re logged into the host where the problematic VM is currently running. Try issuing “vmware-cmd -l” to list the VMs on that host and make sure that yours is there (it will also give you the “official” name of your VM)

By: ghandi

ghandi — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:56:10 +0000

Thanks for this info. It saved me weeks worth of work if I would have had to reproduce my work.

By: richard

richard — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 02:38:49 +0000

Yes, when doing any operation on a VMX file (Virtual machine) – make sure that you reference it using the full absolute path, eg;

vmware-cmd -s register /vmfs/volumes/storage1/VM/VM.vmx

By: Serkan

Serkan — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 14:36:44 +0000

Hi Richard

Thank you for this article, but i still have some problem, i followed your step s but when i try to create a new snapshot it gives the error: “VMControl error -11: No such virtual machine” could you please help me to solve this problem.

By: richard

richard — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 14:02:50 +0000

Steve, give it a little longer, as snapshots can be painfully slow to commit. Try and reduce all other IO on that particular storage array.

I had a 25 GB snapshot (so 25 gb worth of delta changes) and it took a good 2 hours to commit on a RAID 50 array with 12 SCSI 320′s at 15K…