Hello!
I have a vmware ESXI 6.5 instance running with 10TB disk space which hosts my backup server (Ubuntu 18.04 with lvm).
There is one datastore (5.25TB) containing my Backup server which has 2 virtual disks, first disk (200GB) for the OS second disk (3.2TB) for storing backups.
Previously I had to increase the storing capacity of disk2 from 2TB to 3.2TB.
I thought everything is fine and working, but yesterday the backup VM stopped because Datastore got full. So I checked the vmdk files in the Datastore and I have 4 files:
- VMname_1-000001.vmdk 1.85TB - Last Modified Yesterday
- VMNAME_1.vmdk - 3.2TB - Last modified weeks ago, when it was created
- VMname-000001.vmdk - 2.49GB - last modified yesterday
- VMname.vmdk - 200GB - last modified weeks ago, when disk2 was changed
Strange thing is that in the VM information not the same details are shown:
On the VM's operating system disk information shows 1.98TB/3.2TB. So the disk2 is not full.
It seems like when the backup reaches the 1.85TB size (same size as VMname_1-000001.vmdk) than it starts using the free space of the Datastore. When the Datastore disk space gets full, than my backup server stops also.
Is it possible that that the VM using some kind of vmdk disk created by a previous snapshot? Currently there are no snapshots available in the Snapshot manager.
Do you have any idea how to free up more space in the Datastore? Can i delete any of the disk files without data loss?
Many thanks!
HISTORY:
A few weeks ago I had to allocate more space to disk2 (up to 3.2 TB), this was the time when the first problem occurred.
1. Created a snapshot from the backup VM.
2. I increased disk2 with 1.2 TB additional disk space in the VM settings, but I was unable to add this space to the logical volume usding fdisk because:
"DOS partition table format can not be used on drives for volumes
larger than (2199023255040 bytes) for 512-byte sectors. Use parted(1) and GUID
partition table format (GPT)."
3. So I added a third disk, copied all of the data from disk2 to disk3. After that I formatted disk2 and created a new 3.2TB partition.
4. I created the PV-VG-LV from the new partition, mounted it and copied the files back from disk3.
5. Deleted disk3.
6. Deleted the snapshot in snapshot manager.