Garbage Files in Folder report

[dspjones]

I ran the report Garbage Files In Folder on all of my datastores and noticed that there are folders listed that do not contain garbage files. In fact it is showing folders that contain live active VM's that are registered/running in vcenter. How exactly is it determining the status of the files and how do I distinguish which files are the "garbage files" vs the files that should not be deleted. (outside of the obvious ones of course like .vmx .vmdk etc....)

For example the report shows a folder named VM-TFS as having garbage files. It says there are 42.79 GB of garbage files in that folder. When I click the link to the folder, it lists all the files in that folder with the garbage file size totaling 42.79GB for ALL the files in that folder. However, that server is a live-actively running server in our development cluster. There is nothing garbage about it.

Another listing for a server named VM-TSIMIS03 (30.01GB of gabage files). When you click the link it shows the listing of files. The file that it thinks is garbage is the -flat.vmdk file which is 30.00gb in size. However, that server is one of the terminal servers in our production cluster that is part of the main CRM application run by our organization. If I were to delete it, I would probably be looking for work later today.

So what constitutes a garbage file? Is there something wrong with this report and how can it be fixed to show the correct data?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello,

Garbage files report scans datastores for files that do not belong to registered VMs as well as for VMs that are not registered in the VI. Do you have any orphaned snapshot for these VMs by any chance? The quickest way to check that would be to review datastore folder for snapshot files and then compare this list with Snapshot Manager.

Thank you!

[dspjones]

no orphaned snaps and the files I mentioned in my post do belong to registered vm's

[Vitaliy S.]

In this case I would suggest sending the report and the screenshot from virtual infrastructure to our technical team, as this is the first time I hear about such unexpected behavior...

Let me know your ticket number once you open it, so I could also track it.

[dspjones]

sure no problem...

[dspjones]

Case # 00575923