Background Info:
In an effort to free up some space on our datastores I am going to clean up some of our VMs and more specificially the snapshots that some of them are running on.
There are two servers that have been running on snapshots that were created in July of 2011, one is a production Windows 2003 SQL server, the other an IIS 2003 production server (both on different datastores).
The physical blades are running ESXi 4, using vSphere 4 Update 3 to mange them.
The datastore with the SQL server has ~70GB of free space available.
From what I can see the snapshot (000001.vmdk) has grown to about 34.5GB and the original disk is 55GB Thick provisiong.
There is only one snapshot of the server.
Concern:
I have read that vSphere 4U3, when using Delete All Snapshots, will just merge the two files together and then delete the snapshot file. However, how am I assured that there will be enough space on the datastore for it to combine the two files. In my calculations, worst case senario would be that the file merged file would be 78.5GB roughly. That is to say, that every thing that is in the snapshot will be merged into the original file.
Question:
Based on the above information, would this cause the deleting of snapshot file to cause the datastore hit capacity and as such, the merging of the two files to fail?
Also, based on previous expirences, can anyone estimate how long it may take to merge and delete the snapshot, assuming that everythig does workout?
Thank you in advance very much!!
- Alex