Like many of you, I am frustrated with the information I get while a snapshot or several snapshots are being deleted. If you use the GUI to monitor this process then you won’t have much luck trying to determine at what stage the snapshot deletion process is at, the task would stick at 99% for minutes and maybe hours depending on the number of snapshots and their sizes.

There is no way to estimate time left, the only option is to SSH to the ESX or ESXi host, browse to the datastore where that specific machine files do reside. And run the following command

# ls –lhut

This should display files in the following format:

-rw——- 1 root root 40.0G Sep 6 08:27 ServerName-000001-delta.vmdk

This would arrange files according to their access time, starting from most recent. This method should give an indication of which .vmdk file the deletion process is active on. Each snapshot file has 6 digit number attached to it to indicate its position within the snapshot chain (e.g. ServerName-000001-delta.vmdk, ServerName-000002-delta.vmdk, ServerName-000003-delta.vmdk, etc). the deletion process goes through each file in sequence starting with ServerName-000001-delta.vmdk.