After deleting all snapshots for a particular VM, I am alerted that disks require consolidation, presumably because there was not enough disk space to properly delete the snapshots. Sure enough, consolidation fails due to lack of space. I'm wondering if there are any tricks to be able to consolidate the disks when the datastore doesn't have enough space. So far I've come up with the following options, but some are not ideal so I'm looking for other suggestions:
- Increase the size of the datastore: Not ideal because the datastore will have more than enough space once the snapshots are removed and it's difficult to shrink after the fact.
- Storage vmotion the disks to another larger datastore temporarily: A little better but not ideal due to the large amount of data
- Shut down VM and try to consolidate: I read that additional disk space is required with consolidating disks while the VM is powered on. If this is the case, how can I be sure that this will work, e.g. calculate space requred before I incur the outage (see below for more info).
For each of these options, I'm also looking for assistance on calculating the requisite space to properly consolidate, given the following information (let me know if additional info is needed):
