ESXi 4.1 Deleting a large snapshot

Recently, I discovered that one of my VirtualMachine’s had a snapshot that was created 2 years ago which we forgot about. It grew to >100Gb in size and of course I was quite scared to delete it for fear of things going wrong which would have grievious consequences.

I duely made a backup of everything and pressed the “delete all snapshots” button and watched it churn away – first staying at 50% and then completing but it goes back to 50% again a few times.

I got in the next morning and found that all the snapshots were deleted and the server was operating perfectly.

This was a massive relief! So even a snapshot of >100Gb can be deleted / consolidated without problems.

So all those server admins out there; VMware seems to be quite reliable even when deleting extra large snapshots.