With the vSphere client, if you delete any VM, and there were say boot ISO's in the same directory. They stay, as VS Client only purges VM-ware files. Although is there a way to get rid of the whole carcass? ISO's inclusive?
Thank you.
2 Answers
You could script it via the CLI, that or keep all you ISOs in one separate LUN/datastore and mount all VMs CDs from there rather than keep them with the VMs themselves.
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1+1. I keep all of the ISO files in a separate folder in the datastore. When I need to add or delete them I browse the data store. Jan 20, 2010 at 0:31
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didn't even think of that. As that's exactly what we already do for other ISO's - but for some unbeknown reason not for the boot ones. thanks for the trek down common-sense lane.– romantJan 20, 2010 at 3:16
Keeping ISO's in the same folders as the VM files is an unusual practice. The recommendation is to store them in a dedicated folder, ideally on shared storage if you have a cluster of hosts so you don't need multiple copies or have to move them around to present them to different VM's. The reason the VI Client doesn't delete any ISO's is because there is an assumption that they are "external" to the VM's, if you were following the recommended practice you would not want the ISO's to be deleted.
There's nothing badly wrong with storing ISO's in VM folder's if that's what you want to do but you have to live with the few extra steps for cleaning up. You can delete any files you like with the Datastore Browser and that would be safest approach I think. If you really need to do things this way and you are deleting a lot of VM's regularly then a CLI script could do it but it seems like a lot of effort to go to for minimal benefit.
