Snapshots not being merged at end of a protection contract

After running a restore job for a protected workload, target VM is up and running well. If snapshot manager for the VM is checked, it will show 1 or 2 snapshots listed there. These could be named as "PowerConvertReadyToBoot" or "PowerconvertReadyToCopy". These are the snapshots which were in use when the workload was protected.

These snapshots are not merged during the restore job to save time and have the target VM ready to use in production as soon as possible. Based on the size of protected volumes, merging of snapshots can take considerable amount of time and can delay the target VM's availability in a DR scenario. Hence, this is by design that the snapshots are not merged during the restore job.

These snapshots are basically a set of vmdk files in the ESX datastore which form a part of the target VM. These vmdks can be identified by their naming convention as they have an extra set of numerics appended to the filename before the file extension.

*In certain situations, the vmdk files for the VM might need to be attached to another VM to mount the disk. With the snapshots still in place, this is not possible as the virtual disk is split into 2 or more files as explained. These vmdks are the snapshots from the protection contract. In order for these vmdks to be used with another VM, the snapshots need to be merged into the base vmdk.

In order to merge the snapshots, the snapshots need to be deleted from within snapshot manager. Here are steps to follow:

1. Launch Virtual Infrastructure/VSphere client.

2. Expand the host ESX server to list the virtual machines hosted on it.

3. Right click the target VM resulting from the protection of source workload and click Snapshot > Snapshot Manager. The snapshots as mentioned above will be listed in the snapshot manager.

4. Click "Delete All" button at the bottom of the snapshot manager console. Click "Yes" when prompted for confirmation. The message appearing int he confirmation window states that the snapshots will be merged into one.

Note: Now if the VM files are checked in datastore browser, the additional vmdk files will not be listed. The resulting vmdk files can be mounted on another VM if required.

If you have any questions regarding this, please contact the PlateSpin Technical Support team at support@platespin.com