XenServer

Deleting Orphaned Disks in Citrix XenServer

I found that while building my virtual environment with templates ready to deploy I created quite a few templates and snapshots.

I did a pretty good job of deleting the extras when I didn’t need them any more,  but in some cases when deleting a VM I no longer needed,  I forgot to check the box to delete the snapshots that went WITH that VM.

I could see under the dom0 host -> Storage tab  that space was still allocated to the snapshots,  (Usage was higher than the combined visible suage of servers and templates,  and Virtual allocation was way higher than it should be)

But without a place that listed the snapshots that were taking up space. When looking into the way to delete these orphaned snapshots (and the disk snapshots that went with them)  I found some cumbersome command line methods. 

Like this old method that someone used - http://blog.appsense.com/2009/11/deleting-orphaned-disks-in-citrix-xenserver-5-5/

After a big more digging,  i found that by just clicking on the Local Storage under the domU  then clicking on the ‘Storage’ tab under there,  I would see a list of all of the storage elements that are allocated.  I would see some that were for snapshots without a name.  Turns out those were the ones that were orphaned,  If they were allocated to a live server the delete button would not be highlighted so I just deleted those old ones.