Consolidating snapshots for a virtual machine
When you initiate a Delete or DeleteAll operation on snapshots, the snapshot is immediately deleted from Snapshot Manager, then the backing Virtual Machine Disk .vmdk files are consolidated on-disk. If the consolidation fails, some Virtual Disk files may remain on disk and/or be actively used on the Datastore, consuming storage capacity.
The ESXi host that the virtual machine is registered on must be an ESXi 5.x/6.0 host.
Before you proceed, ensure to consider these points related to snapshot consolidation:
- The remove snapshot process can take a long time to complete if the snapshots are large.
- If the consolidation process is stopped before completing, it may result in data corruption.
- Virtual machine performance may be degraded during the snapshot consolidation process.
To consolidate snapshots:
- Right-click the virtual machine and click Snapshot > Consolidate.
- Check the Needs Consolidation column to verify that the task succeeded.
If the task succeeds, the Configuration Issues message clears and the Needs Consolidation value is No.
Consolidating snapshots may be required when:
- The snapshot commit fails due to locked files.
- There is a temporary loss of communication between the vCenter Server and the ESXi/ESX host during snapshot commit. The most common cause of this is an environmental issue which can have a knock on affect on the ESXi/ESX host management agent hostd.
