Sharing and Snapshots – Another Look at Sharing VMDK Files

Late Tuesday evening I was troubleshooting an issue with a Mr. Smith from #vmware on Freenode. Yes, really, his name was smith. The issue we were troubleshooting was related to sharing VMDK files, between two VMs running on separate hosts.

After pointing Mr. Smith to my “Share and Share Alike” and feverently insisting that it would work. “Really”, I promised, “I use it all the time.” He provided me some screenshots of the error he was getting in return:

Descriptive isn’t it? So we chased it down this morning. What happened here was that one of the two VMs in the config had snapshots running. After deleting the snaps, and before the song with Leprechauns and Unicorns, the disk added on the second VM and powered on. As a result, the world was made a much happier place.

If you have any questions on this post or any others, please feel free to hit me up on twitter, or drop a line in the comments section.

Tagged as: snapshots, Troubleshooting, vmdk