We are running ESX 3.5.0 and are using VCB for making backups. Yesterday VCB failed to remove its snapshot. That has happened a couple of times before, and I removed it manually as usual. But this time the VCB snapshot got replaced by a "Consolidate helper" snapshot instead.
We have had a snapshot that was hard to delete before, so I knew that if I created another snapshot and then selected "Delete all" in Snapshot Manager, it should delete all snapshots. So at the end of the day I shutdown the server, created another snapshot and then deleted all snapshots. All snapshots disappeared from Snapshot Manager, and I went home.
Today the server had been "paused" by VMware, since all disk space on the LUN had been filled by snapshot delta/redo/vmdk files. I had to move another servers disk from the LUN to make it resume again. So the snapshot was not removed after all. There are now several delta/redo/vmdk files on the LUN, but no snapshot i the Snapshot Manager in the GUI.
How do I remove this snapshot?
Arnim van Lieshout at the VMware Communities suggested using VMware Converter to clone the vm to a new machine. During the conversion all snapshots get consolidated. I followed his advice and it solved the problem.