ESXi 4.1 – Removing orphan (broken) delta files

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March 22, 2012 by aubreykloppers

FIXING VM (ESXi 4.1) WITH BROKEN (orphaned) DELTA FILE(s):

(This happened because I shut the system down while VEEAM was deleting the snapshot…)

Looking at the VM built on an ESXi 4.1 system through ssh, you find delta files not in the snapshot view of the Vmware Client.  To fix this is quite easy, but be warned, it does take a long time.

1. Shut VM down.
2. Create a snaphot.
3. Delete all snapshots.

NOTE: You can do this on-the-fly, but this is when the operation takes quite a time.  I waited more than 14 hours for a 500GB VM with 6 delta files orphaned to recover the disk-space.  That said, I recovered on a 1TB DATASTORE more than 500GB space.

This removes the delta file that was not in the vSphere console.

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