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Posts Tagged ‘virtual’

Unable to commit snapshots because files are locked.

January 5th, 2012 No comments

I recently had an issue where the backup software had left a snapshot on the vm, which wasn’t visible in the snapshot manager.  Usually to get rid of this you would just snapshot the machine again, and the process would re-create the missing links.  Deleting the snapshots would then take the machine back to its usual state, happy days.  However this time that didn’t work, I could create snapshots, but couldn’t then commit them, resulting in a few snapshots being overlaid, but not showing up in the snapshot manager.  This was on ESXi 4.1, the backup software was VEEAM 5.

I did a bit of searching online, and found a couple of ways to remove the file locks which were showing up when trying to commit the snapshots.  The first option I tried was simply to disable the backup software which I thought might have the lock on the files.  Because of the situation I was unable to reboot the VM that was running the backup software.  This might have worked, but I don’t know for sure.

Next was to restart the management agents on the host.  Given I wasn’t onsite I wasn’t able to go in through the normal console, and restart the agents, luckily you can do the following.

  1. Connect using the vSphere Client
  2. Clicky on the Configuration Tab
  3. Clicky on the Security Profile link
  4. Properties
  5. Remote Tech Support (SSH)
  6. Options
  7. Start
This then allows you to ssh into the box, best practice says this should be turned off again once you have completed what you want to do.  Once you are SSH’d into the machine you can run a script to restart all the management services.
/sbin/services.sh restart
Once I did this I was able to the snapshot the machine, and commit the snapshots, for me this took quite a while as the initial failed snapshot removal had happened quite a while ago.  The progress bar in the vSphere client sits at about 95% for a very long time.  You can use the following command from within the ssh terminal to check on the progress…
watch “ls *.vmdk”  * This works in esx(i) 4.1
I have included a link below to a site which provides more information on the above, and also additional switches etc to show more useful information.
Credit
Categories: ESX, ESXi, VMware Tags: , , , , , , ,

My Virtual Playground (Another Shuttle whitebox build)

September 29th, 2011 2 comments

Having moved back to Australia from the UK, and deciding to start getting serious about virtualization, the only reasonable thing to do was put together a home lab… My Virtual Playground.  After reading about possible set-ups of many others I decided the Shuttle whitebox would be my best option.  The plan is to have a self building test platform which I can throw together from scratch using various PowerShell scripts, PXE installs etc, I’m not sure how successful this will be, but either way I should learn a lot while trying.  As the build comes together I’ll add more and more info on what I have done, and how I’ve done it.  The community for vmware has been so fantastic to me since I started working with vSphere, its time to give something back.

 

The Purchases –

2x Shuttle SH67H3 bare bones boxes

2x Intel i5-2500s @3.30GHz

4x 8GB DDR3 RAM

2x Intel Dual Port nics (PT, I read that the ET if much better, but for my budget and setup the PT should be more than adequate)

2x 4GB USB Memory Sticks

Netgear GS108T

Thecus 4200eco (support iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, etc)

2x Seagate 1TB HDD’s, raid 5 in the Thecus

 

Currently the machine are all hooked up, there is still some networking LACP etc to be configured, which I’ll provide more details on later.

Categories: ESX, ESXi, VMware Tags: , , , , ,