Hyper V - Virtual machines won't start - no disk space

[SteveB_NI]

Help please!   I've ran out of disk space on my server (Windows Server 2019) which runs Hyper V for 4 virtual machines (servers).

 

I noticed today that the disk space was sitting at 5GB so initiated a check point - big mistake this dropped immediately to 14MB and immediately paused the virtual machines and had to be rebooted.

 

Now the server is sitting at 40MB and hasn't got enough disk space to fire up any of my VMs - both DCs, File server and printer server all dead.

 

When I try to start any of them a message appears saying DC01 failed to start, could not initialise memory there is not enough space on the disk.

 

A quick look at the server hard drive suggests there is nothing which can be easily deleted to free up space.

 

There is obviously the .AVHDX files under the virtual hard disk locations 

 

Any pointers welcome! Thanks!

[machy]

have you any older checkpoints you can delete?

 

 

[3s-gtech]

You'll have a load of unmerged checkpoints. If they show in the console, merge them - if not, you may need to manually merge them:

 

https://www.nakivo.com/blog/merge-hyper-v-snapshots-step-step-guide/

 

The proliferation of snapshots is usually caused by your backup software - check that it's working as it should merge after backup.

[SteveB_NI]

I stupidly enabled check points on one of them and then immediately disabled it again but can't now even inspect > compact hard drive as it crashed before the merge was complete.  Despite check points being turned off in the settings it still won't let me access that.

 

I have found a couple of old VMs on it which are no longer used so I'm removing them now which will hopefully get me enough space to at the very least power on the DC and FS server! 

[SteveB_NI]

I removed 1 of the old 10GB files and it has now given me enough space to get them all powered back up for now.  Thanks!

[3s-gtech]

If the machines are now running, you can get them to auto-merge usually, by restarting. Once merge per restart.

[SteveB_NI]

Thanks all I checked again there and it’s now risen to 40gb free (despite only deleting a 10gb file!) so it looks like it has merged down the checkpoints it had created

 

Bit more house keeping required to get it down a bit more!

 

thanks everyone for your help