Wednesday, September 20, 2017
Change Default Snapshot location ESXi 5
Change Default Snapshot location ESXi 5
Recently, I�m a bit surprised when one of my colleague has told me that some of the VMs had an error message related to a snapshot after we had migrated it from VI3 to vSphere 5. When we did some investigation, we have found out that the default snapshot location now wasn�t pointing to VM working directory. Instead, the snapshot file that has been created was saved into base vmdk folder.
Due to my customer�s requirement in 2008, all VMs configuration file (.vmx) has been stored separately from it base virtual disk(vmdk) LUN. Of course there was some free space left in the (vmx) datastore for keeping the snapshot file but not for vmdk LUN. The outcome was pretty obvious, one by one the VM will pop-up an error message related to �no free space� left in the datastore whenever we had performed VM snapshot. Since we weren�t aware and prepare for this, the only thing that we can do is to change the snapshot location back to virtual machine home folder(.vmx) by adding one parameter to individual VM as follows.
- Power off the VM
- Edit VM setting
- Go to Option tab
- Advance (Parameter) and
- Add row and then put �snapshot.redoNotWithParent�
- Set the value to �true�
- Power on the VM
Notes:
- Existing snapshot will be migrated to base vmdk once you performed storage vMotion
- �workingDir� parameter is no more valid for vSphere 5
