topic Re: Cleaning up orphaned SMVI snapshots in ONTAP Discussions

Cleaning up orphaned SMVI snapshots

michaelsooper — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:12:18 GMT

I've found a good number of orphaned snapshots on two of the volumes under ./snapshots created by SMVI, but I am unable to find a way to clean them without just browing the datastores via the VI Client and deleting them. My google searches have only returned how to clean up abondaned VMWare snapshots, but nothing specifically for /vol/.snapshots.

Thanks,

Michael

Re: Cleaning up orphaned SMVI snapshots

michaelsooper — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:34:11 GMT

I've been monitoring the event log and I'm seeing an error ID of 4096 that SMVI was unable to delete the expired snapshot under the /.snapshot folder on the datastore.

All google searches just get me results for orphaned snapshots under the virtual machine's folder that are vmware based, but nothing for these undeletable snapshot folders created by SMVI. I have a ticket opened with NetApp but haven't heard back from the tech since initial contact.

Re: Cleaning up orphaned SMVI snapshots

amritad — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 03:30:08 GMT

Hi Michael,

Please take a look at this. Shows you how you can get rid of orphaned snapshots

http://blogs.netapp.com/virtualization/2010/02/cleaning-up-vmware-snapshots.html

Also please post all SMVI related questions in the virtualization communities.

REgards

Amrita

Re: Cleaning up orphaned SMVI snapshots

michaelsooper — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:33:53 GMT

Wow, totally forgot about this post.

Anyways, the issue was from a power outage that locked up snapshot files and stop them from being deleted, which ate up space. A NetApp support rep walked me through breaking the snapmirror membership and manually deleting the old snapshot files.