ESXi Snapshots not showing in VI Client

Yesterday I made a mistake. We have a virtual machine set up to test Spacewalk which runs CentOS.

It has a virtual disk for this OS on datastore1 and a virtual disk for the data on datastore2. datastore1 had 11 gb free and datastore2 had 300 gb free. I snapshotted the VM, we did some work, and I committed the snapshot. Except it didn’t work. Now the machine won’t stay booted.I remembered reading something from Yellow-Bricks about disk space and snapshots. Oops. Since this VM was on an ESXi host, there was no service console commands to commit the snapshot.

This error popped up, and the VM would power down:

There is no more space for the redo log of VMNAME-000001.vmdk.

I freed up some space on datastore1, but I couldn’t find how to commit the snapshot. There were several -delta.vmdk files in the virtual machine’s folder on datastore1.

Solution: After freeing up some disk space, I created another snapshot from the VI Client. Then I immediately when to “Delete All”. This got rid of the orphaned snapshot as well as the newly created one.