I'm sure many of you have seen the new Snapshot > Consolidate option in the drop-down menu of Virtual Machines in vSphere 5.0, and are probably wandering what the use case is. If you haven't seen it, here it is:
The reason this feature is introduced is to address a rather large supportability issue. Occasionally we saw where a snapshot commit/delete operation request would not merge the snapshot delta files with the VMs base disk (what we term a consolidate operation). Unfortunately, this failure to consolidate was not apparent via the UI, and usually only became noticeable to the end user when the delta files grew very large, possibly resulting in a full VMFS or NFS volume if they were attached to very large VMs. Support engineers from GSS (VMware's Global Support Services) would then have you use their many tricks of the trade to consolidate the snapshot deltas into the VM base disk. The issue is that although support resolves most if not all of these cases, it is a very time consuming & repetitive task.
This new option allows end-users, in the event of a consolidate failure, to do the consolidate operation for themselves without opening a Service Request with VMware. But how do we know whether a consolidate was successful or not? Well, if a commit/delete operation doesn't manage to merge the snapshot delta disks into the VM's base disk.
Note : Only Administrator can use the Snapshot Consolidate option to merge them.
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