I got a small problem regarding a acceptance environment build on VMware Server (currently version 1.02) on Windows. This virtual environment with, amongst others a Oracle 10gR1 database on it, was once build with the older VMware GSX 3.21 software, but the supported (and paid for) VMware GSX version has become over time, the free downloadable VMware Server edition.
When I started, I thought it would be useful to enable the snapshot function, so if an upgrade or patch process, for database, OS or application went wrong, I would be able to reset the virtual machine to it’s starting point and try again… I noticed that after upgrading the software to VMware Server 1.01, and after a while to VMware Server 1.02, that I couldn’t disable the snapshot function anymore because the enable/disable feature was grayed out. The VMware disks had a lot of REDO files, so I wanted to reclaim this space, because the SAN where the VMware virtual disks were residing, had almost no disk space left.
Normally, if the VMware Tools are installed in a VMware machine, it is possible to shrink the disk space of the virtual disks, but this feature is only available if, amongst others, the snapshot feature is not enabled. In my case, I couldn’t disable snapshot feature because it was grayed out and not clickable anymore…
So what now?