I've recently run into a bit of a pickle with my Nutanix/VMware setup. We had an old VM that had our file shares on it. In an effort to simplify our environment we needed to move the 2nd drive on the Windows server to a new VM. No big deal, disconnect the drive, unattach the VMDK from the old VM and move it to the new one. This has been running great up until recently. We realized that we've been having issues with our Veeam backups.
The backup causes the new VM to become unavailable for up to 45 minutes while it tries to delete the snapshot. The problem is, the drive is sitting on a pile of snapshots causing some speed issues. Unfortunately those snapshots didn't get consolidated before the move between VMs. According to a VMware storage engineer, it's trying to cleanup asynchronously during this period of time then finally dies out and switches to synchronous mode.
Here's the kicker, the original VM is yelling at us to be consolidated, but fails during consolidation saying that the parent's size is smaller than the child's. My guess is part of this is related to the fact that the 2nd drive that got "moved" to a new server, is still physically sitting in the same folder in the datastore as the original VM. I would love to just be able to consolidate the VMDK that is attached to our new server, so it's not running on a bunch of deltas. Is there a way to do that?
My other option is to think about copying data to a new VMDK (in Windows) and then shutting down the share for a few hours while I do that (which I would prefer not doing). If that's the route that you guys suggest we head, what software would be the best to determine the differences between the data? I have a large ammount of the data copied over to a new VMDK and would just want to do deltas for the rest after I down the shares (don't allow shares to be mapped, not down the actual server). Thoughts?