Delete a .vmdk file

To continue this discussion, please ask a new question. Get answers from your peers along with millions of IT pros who visit Spiceworks. Each one is a different size When I go check the setting of the machine, it says that the hard drive is test Popular Topics in VMware.

Which of the following retains the information it's storing when the system power is turned off? Submit ». L This person is a verified professional. Verify your account to enable IT peers to see that you are a professional.

Adam Gadoury This person is a verified professional. Consolidating is always a good idea when you have multiple snapshots, for sure. Let us know if you have any other issues! Thanks Hi, No you can not! You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email.

Skip to content Using thin provisioned virtual disks can provide many benefits. Getting that Space Back! This essentially destroys any lingering data and makes the free space identifiable. Before Getting Started Before getting started, there are a few things to check and a few safety precautions that I want to call out: Ensure you have a good backup of the VM before starting. This is just a general best practice for any type of activity that manipulates a virtual disk.

Consolidate any lingering snapshots. This process will only work on VMDK disks without snapshots. File system repair tools may need data in these blocks if there are inconsistencies detected. In my case, I just ran: SDelete64 -z c: The whole process took only 5 minutes or so and was very uneventful.

Hole Punching! Please feel free to leave any questions or comments below, or reach out to me on Twitter vswitchzero Share this: Twitter Facebook. Thanks for the comment, Justus. This process only works if you are already thin. Your post is very helpful with clear instructions. Thank you so much. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:.

Email required Address never made public. In order to remove safely the snapshots that you see in your esxi hosts you have to dig a little from the esxi hosts and do a quite manual operation. Also in order to see if you are in the host that the Virtual Machine is actually running you can run this:. This information we can take it from the. If you see is reffering to the files that we already have found on the Datastores.

Now we are starting getting to the last point that we can see if we can safely remove the files or these files are used by something else backup maybe.

If not, it means that we can safely remove them because they are not in use. As I told before, if a vmdk is locked by a host you will see it in the output that will have the MAC address of the specified host. But as we have now the owner section has Zeroes that means that is not locked from any host.

So we can continue searching if we can safely remove these vmdks. In oder to be completely sure that also these vmdks are not locked from any process we will use the touch command:. View all posts by anksos.