Blackforce » safely http://www.blackforce.co.uk just a few random articles and photos from my life!! Fri, 06 Aug 2010 14:26:56 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 VMware ESX – Commit snapshots safely with no data loss. http://www.blackforce.co.uk/2009/03/04/vmware-esx-commit-snapshots-safely-with-no-data-loss http://www.blackforce.co.uk/2009/03/04/vmware-esx-commit-snapshots-safely-with-no-data-loss#comments Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:52:05 +0000 Dale http://www.blackforce.co.uk/?p=342 If you have been unfortunate enough to find yourself with loads of snapshots in ESX and have snapshots with file sizes bigger than a couple of GB. Then you might be scared to commit them in case of data loss.

You can easily get rid of all the snapshots without any data loss. Using the VMKFS tools you can clone out the hard drives in their current state including snapshots to 1 VMDK. To do this run the following when SSH’d in.

vmkfstools -i harddrivename-000001.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/datastore/ new foldername/new_harddrivename.vmdk

Then it will clone the drive. This may take a couple of hours depending on the size of your drive. Then you just attach the new drive to a newly created VM.

VMware Knowledgebase : 1002458

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