I'm always a little reluctant when I'm at a customer and they use a lot of snapshotting, it is a very helpful and useful tool but you have to use it with caution otherwise it could cause big problems. Prior to vSphere 5 there was a possibility to fix such a situation thru the CLI, now with vSphere 5 you get a extra option in the VM - Snapshot menu called 'Consolidate' this feature should clean up any discrepancies between the Snapshot Manager interface and the actual situation at datastore level. This could case all kinds of problems, first of all VM performance issues as the VM is still running in snapshot mode, secondly you are not able to alter the virtual disks of this VM and in the long run your could potentiality run out of space on your datastore because the snapshot keeps on growing. This would result in the snapshot manager interface telling you there are no more snapshots present, but at datastore level they still exist and could even be still in use / still be growing. VSphere 5 introduced a new feature to clean up VM snapshot 'left-overs' which could be the result of a snapshot removal action where the consolidation step has gone bad. I hope this helps you out and saves some headaches Please keep in mind that this should be tested in a test environment before deploying to production.

Var actionResult = System.getModule('.basic').vim3WaitTaskEnd(task) Var task = activeSnapshot.removeSnapshot_Task(removeChildren ,consolidateSS) Set to if you want to consolidate the disk When I added the underlined sections in the code below in the Schema item 'Remove Snapshot' does not come up with the alert. removeSnapshot_Task function does not require the condolidate Snapshots parameter to be set to true, as it does it by default( This appears to be false, at least in this instance). (optional) If set to true, the virtual disk associated with this snapshot will be merged with other disk if possible. Removes this snapshot and deletes any associated storage.įlag to specify removal of the entire snapshot subtree. (Exerpt from documentation for vOrchestrator API 5.1.1)

VCenter Server 5.1 Plug-In API Reference for vCenter Orchestrator It appears that the default workflow that VMware has included has a quirk compared to the documentation in its API documentation. I did some testing as we were looking at doing the same thing.

Vmware disk consolidation needed