Hey everyone! I'm still pretty new to being a Sysadmin (only two months in), and I came from a Tier III Support background. I usually work with Hyper-V but don't feel totally confident with server admin tasks yet. Tonight, I had to expand a disk drive for a Windows VM on our main file server. I thought it would be straightforward, but I ran into a problem. The option to expand the drive was grayed out, and I found out that it might be because of existing snapshots. I prepped for the edit by shutting down the VM and then decided to delete all snapshots, not realizing how old they were. Now I'm stuck with a 40-day-old 7TB snapshot being deleted, and I can't boot up the VM (which has all the company shared drives) until it completes. The workday starts in 13 hours. How much trouble am I really in?
5 Answers
While waiting for the snapshot to merge, maybe write a script to monitor your VMs and check for snapshots older than 7 days. It's much better to keep things clean and organized to prevent issues like this in the future!
Honestly, this might turn out to be a good thing in the long run. Those snapshots can really pile up and cause performance issues. Just make sure to keep an eye on snapshot usage in the future, and possibly set up some automation to report or delete them regularly.
Honestly, it doesn't seem like your immediate action caused the problem – it’s more about the snapshots that were there before. If your snapshots are your backups, you might be in a tough spot, but it’s likely not the end of the world. Just make sure to check back on the process in a few hours. It should start to clear up before morning, but the size might slow things down.
Don't beat yourself up over it! You're probably turning this situation into a learning experience. It can take a while to delete large snapshots, especially on older VMs. Just keep monitoring it and communicate with your team about what's happening, and you'll be fine.
For next time, try working with Gen2 VMs and stick with SCSI controllers for all disks instead of IDE. With SCSI, you can hot delete snapshots without powering down the VM, which saves a lot of hassle. Also, never run snapshots for more than a day or two max; it sounds like there was a major oversight in managing those snapshots!
Absolutely! Monitoring scripts for old snapshots could save you a lot of trouble. Definitely something to implement moving forward.
Yeah, plus, if there's a lot of disk I/O, that could stretch the time it takes. But hopefully, it won’t take days—fingers crossed!