This morning a woke up and grabbed my BlackBerry to see if there was any news (mail / twitter). The first e-mail I read was one from our monitoring system that one of the VM’s did not respond anymore. So I started a remote session and logged on to vCenter. There I saw a running task which was running since last night :-S.
These are the steps I took to solve this issue:
- Connect to the ESX Host via SSH.
- Run this command Service mgmt-vmware restart to restart the service
- If the VM is still okay then you don’ t have to restart the ESX Host, otherwise restart the ESX Host.
- Open the snapshot manager of the VM and create a new snapshot
- Now delete all snapshots
- Poweron the VM
I want to thank @Depping, @diederikm, @laurensdekoning and @sanderdaems for pointing me in the right direction.
ICT-Freak.nl 
Sometimes the remove snapshot tasks take quite long. It’ll sprint through the first 95% then waits there untill it’s done. This is mostly when you made that snapshot a long time ago and never deleted it. The commit process takes quite long then.
It’s smart to check the VMFS to see if the files are commited before you restart the service otherwise you might end up with a half commited snapshot…
This post saved me…thanks for the clear topic description.
I was cleaning up snaps after doing maintenance last night….I got freaked out when my server stopped responding. It took me 7 minutes to realize the service was down and get it back up and responding again, but luckily it didn’t require a reboot or anything.
hi there,
I have a similar situaiton where the snapshot file became older. Delete all snapshot took around 15 minutes, then the message came that the operation time out. How we will get to know if this process still running behind the scene. Also when you go to the VM snapshot manager it it is still showing there is a snapshot and the delete buttons are enable. Should I wait for sometime or repress the delete button again.
I started a snapshot in error and now have a powered off state. How do I restore it all to its original state?