What we should use here as a source file is the descriptor file that points to our snapshot. When you’re in the source folder, make sure you get the correct disk / descriptor file. If you do a “ls- lah” within the folder (that command shows you a list of files and the filesize in a human-readable format) you will see all vmdk disk files, flat vmdk’s, delta vmdk’s and the vmdk descriptor files. Create a new empty shell VM and add the cloned VMDK as existing disk.Clone the VMDK files from source to target.Then navigate to the current folder where the VM files are located.On the datastore create a new folder where you put the cloned VMDK files.Shutdown the VM you want to clone because of the file locks.Logon to your ESXi host with PuTTY / SSH where the VM is registered (or at least to any ESXi host which has access to the datastore where the VM resides on).And we scheduled another maintenance window with the service owner. And as you’re doing a disk clone locally on the ESXi host with “vmkfstools” and not withing vCenter, there shouldn’t be a timeout either. During the cloning of a disk file the snapshot will be consolidated. Some research and again having a chat with VMware support led us towards cloning the disk files. “Error communicating with the host” isn’t very helpful in that moment. Consolidation timed at around 96%, not sure why. What a bummer! So we scheduled another maintenance window to consolidate that snapshot. We found out that this snapshot was about 400 GB in size. The VM came back online but with the known “Disk Consolidation Needed status”. Together with VMware support we were able to stop the snapshot deletion. But the VM not only went offline for some time, but unexpectedly for hours. That could happen, depending on snapshot size and storage system. The VM went offline because of disk consolidation. So we scheduled a maintenance window to delete the snapshot. Faster said than done. We weren’t able to add disk space because of that snapshot. We found out that there is a snapshot when the VM or service owner requested some additional disk space. So this snapshot was growing and growing. But someone created that snapshot before a software upgrade and forget to delete it. That by itself isn’t an issue, a snapshot is nothing special. We had one virtual machine with a snapshot. Recently we had a weird issue in our office.
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