HyperV // A lot of Checkpoints/Snapshots - Unable to merge

Question

Hi guys,

Hoping someone can shed some light or point me in the right direction.

I have HyperV running on Windows Server 2016 Standard with 7 VMs running (3 windows & 4 Linux). All VMs are running perfectly.

We use Acronis Cloud to run daily backups which is working on 6 VMs and failing on 1. So what we are going to do is export the VM and move it for testing, this is where we noticed a problem.

When attempting to export the VM in question it fails stating that it failed to merge. What I found odd was that there are no snapshots listed within HyperV Manager. When browsing the VM and snapshot location I can then see hundreds of snapshots have been taken. I would like to get these VMs merged to allow me to export the VM for testing.

HyperV Manager

File Explorer

Has anyone ever experienced this or know the best process for merging these files manually?

I have spoken to Acronis support and they are stating that this would not be something caused by the Acronis backup process.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Dean.

Answer 1

Hi,

If you didn't create the checkpoints manually, I assume the avhdx files are recovery checkpionts created via backup tools, while not merged automatically after backup.

Please check the following article about recovery checkpiont and how to merge it manually:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/virtualization/cannot-delete-recovery-checkpoint-vm

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/6257.manually-merge-avhd-to-vhd-in-hyper-v.aspx

Thanks for your time!
Best Regards,
Anne

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Answer 2

Hello,

I've found this script very usefull : https://github.com/TheGabeMan/Hyper-V-MergeAVHDX

Shout out to TheGabeMan - saved me a ton of time, proper scripting dude ;-)

Answer 3

Hello everybody.

I am facing the same problem on my infrastructure. I have a cluster consisting of 5 nodes and some virtual machines. In a certain vm it has shown me the above image with many avhdx files without showing me in the hyper-v manager that there is a checkpoint

Answer 4

We are also seeing a similar issue across Windows 2016 and Windows 2019 during the backup. This is very intermiittent however. No antivirus are runing.

Any pointer to figure out the RCA will be a great help.