Snapshots within vmware can sometimes cause major problems. For example, you delete a snapshot from within your vsphere client and it shows it’s been removed successfully. But has it? and is it going to cause you issues as it grows in size? Even though the GUI shows the snapshot has been removed successfully, the snapshot may still exist on the datastore and overtime can grow too large causing storage and performance issues.

With version 5, vmware have added a great new tool. If you delete a snapshot from the GUI but it does not successfully delete from the datastore, you will be informed. Your vmware vcenter server will display a warning when the descriptor and the snapshot files do not match.

 After the warning is displayed, you can right click the virtual machine, click snapshot manager and you will be able to click consolidate to resolve. So no longer need to commit snapshots from a command line.

The consolidate option is not available within Vsphere Web Client if you’re using it.