Running a back up failure error "the vm has no disk" (4047855)

Backup of one of the VM's on the ESX(i) host started to fail with error message: "the VM has no disk" Taking snapshot using Snapshot Manager may fail as well.

There is a large snapshot present on the VM. Please open "Snapshot Manager" on the VM in qestion and see if there is old (open few days/monts ago) snapshot.

To check the size of the snapshot, click on the VM inside vSphere client>Summary Tab. On the right side right-click on the name of datastore>Browse Datastore. Open the directory of the VM and look for any files ...000001.vmdk or ...000002.vmdk.. etc. Check the size of the file.

Right click on the VM inside vSphere client go to: Snapshot>Snapshot Manager>Delete All

CAUTION:If this is a "large" snapshot please connect directly to host (not to VC) using your vSphere client. This process is very heavy on host CPU's/memory it is possible that host might become unresponsive during that period of snapshot commitment. It is highly recommended to do this during low activity time or maintenance window. For some large snapshots (over 50GB) we have seen this process to take more than few hours depending on environment.

Note: This snapshot creation and deletion time could be shortened by certain adjustments to ESX host¹ (ESX only)

¹Snapshot removal creation process can be optimized using "Recommended Service Console Configurations (ESX Only)" Quest KB: SOL77393

vMware KB's:

KB 1015180: Understanding virtual machine snapshots in VMware ESX

KB 1002836: Why snapshot removal can stop a virtual machine for long time

KB 1025279: Best practices for virtual machine snapshots in the VMware environment

KB 1002310: Committing snapshots when there are no snapshot entries in the snapshot manager