Deleting Snapshots from VMWare (vSphere Client 4)

[newpersn]

If i "Delete All" of my snapshots.

 

Will i lose anything? or Everything stay the same?

 

Thanks.

[FN-GM]

No. Deleting the snapshot is equivalent to deleting the a backup. You obviously loose the backup but not the live data.

[pybe]

It should consolidate all of the immediate snapshots before the You are here current state to the base parent disk and then remove all existing snapshots from the Snapshot Manager and virtual machine.

[newpersn]

Thanks

 

I needed to add more space to a vm. 40gb drive trying to install updates with less than a gb was painful.

 

Wouldn't let me add the space at first so I did a quick Google and found I had to remove (or delete) snapshots.

 

Also added a 2nd vcpu.

[CyberDrac]

I was surprised to find that a snapshot in VMWare doesn't correspond with what most people would consider a snapshot in any other IT related field. We had take snapshots of all our running machines in the belief that they were a image of a machine in a particular state at a particular point in time, a backup to all intents and purposes ... this is not the case. They are a live entity which steadily grow over time with the changes made to the machine which on a machine with a lot of activity can very quickly eat up your SAN storage space. We ended up with some snapshots that were many times the size of the original disks and memory and growing until machines stopped functioning due to lack of disk space.

[newpersn]

I was surprised to find that a snapshot in VMWare doesn't correspond with what most people would consider a snapshot in any other IT related field. We had take snapshots of all our running machines in the belief that they were a image of a machine in a particular state at a particular point in time, a backup to all intents and purposes ... this is not the case. They are a live entity which steadily grow over time with the changes made to the machine which on a machine with a lot of activity can very quickly eat up your SAN storage space. We ended up with some snapshots that were many times the size of the original disks and memory and growing until machines stopped functioning due to lack of disk space.

 

we had the same problems around 5months ago. Had a power failure and the vm machine wouldn't start up due to disk space (nothing left on the datastore) Deleted a few log files and it was happy again. Now deleted or consolidate the snapshots its got over 300GB left on its datastore....

[Domino]

Vmware's guidance has always been to not use a snapshot for longer than 72 hours: VMware KB: Best practices for virtual machine snapshots in the VMware environment

 

It's not a backup.