Delete orphaned VM's and VHD's

[Jesse]

Hello,

 

Still banging around on Hyper-V server 2012.  Anyone know how to delete the folders/VHDX's for orphaned (i.e. deleted) vm's?  When I deleted the VM's the folders and VHD's remain and I cannot find a way to delete them.  I had some luck from the command line in Hyper-V server 2012, but some of the folders will not budge.

 

Thanks,

 

Jesse

[Sorta Oldguy]

I haven't had that problem. A few days ago, deleted a VM from the Hyper-V manager. This didn't delete the files that made up the VM. Then went to the location of the files in file explorer and deleted them. The first time I tried, it wouldn't let me, saying they were in use, so I shut down the manager and waited a minute. It then let me delete the whole folder where I had the VM files.

Edited May 27, 2013 by Sorta Oldguy

[jmwills]

Yes, the service would have had a lock on the files.

[Jesse]

Hello,

 

So I would need to insure that I am not remotely connected to the host via Hyper V manager and then delete from the command line on the host?

 

Thanks,

 

Jesse

[Sorta Oldguy]

I don't really know. I was just using an RDP session when I did what I described above. Maybe there's some sort of timeout on the locks.

[jem101]

When you deleted the unwanted VMs, did you by any chance have snapshots of them or had ever put them into a 'saved state' and not deleted these before deleting the VMs themselves?

 

If so then what's become locked is an xml file and a folder with the same name (it'll be a long GUID-style name) containing two files, a .bin file and a .vsv file. These are the saved state files (the bin file is a copy of the memory allocated to the VM just before shutdown and the vsv is a saved version of the VHD file itself).

 

Anyhow even though the virtual machine itself has been deleted, the host hangs on to these just in case you want to ever restore it. On the host, from the command prompt, you should be able to navigate to where the VHD(x) files are stored and there will be a folder within this called "Virtual Machines". You should be able to delete the VHDX files from the command prompt but the contents of "Virtual Machines" is locked by the Hyper-V system. In theory (at least) if the VHD files are still there, you could create a new (temporary) virtual machine with the same name pointing to the VHD files, start it up to check that it's all intact and then make sure that you delete any existing snapshots, shut it down and also delete any associates saved states for it. The you should be able to delete the VM itself and that will delete the problematic folders.

 

If you don't have the VHDX files any more then I believe it is still possible but it involves creating an new VM with the same memory and disk size settings and then renaming various files and folders in an attempt to trick the Hyper-V manager. Now I have to admit that in the one instance this has happened to me, I have never gotten it to work properly and as it is on a live production server with six virtual machines running on it, I'm not too keen to start pocking at it with the big pointy stick of IT just to see what will fall out - they are not doing any harm other than taking up a bit of disk space so I've left them alone.   

[Jesse]

Hello,

 

Thanks for the info jem.  I guess I will learn to live with them.

 

Jesse

[ikon]

Sounds like a good topic for a support ticket to MS.