Had an issue today where a client with an MD3200i san and VMware esx reported a problem with space when copying contents of physical cds to a virtual machine for installation. The strange issue was that they reported a disk space message when there was in fact plenty of space on the virtual disk. After checking this realised we could not get a console connection to the virtual machine. Checking the space on the datastore instead and freeing up some space allowed us to restart the virtual machine.
We then noted that Trilead – used for the backup of images of the VMware vms to local storage had reported an issue with the backup of the machine we had an issue with. The warning was “The task has completed successfully but a previous orphaned Backup Snapshot has been detected”.
On checking we realised that there were in fact two snapshots running both for memory and disk – and after chatting with Trileads great support was able to delete all the snapshots. However be warning – this can take an extended amount time – do not try to interrupt it !! Let it finish even if it takes hours !! Mine paused at 95% for quite a while.
So if running Trilead or any other vmware backup mechanism – keep an eye out for orphan snapshops as they can derail your vm if you are short on space on your datastore.