Hyper-V: Help with accidental checkpoint, no disk space

[avazee98]

Hello, I just realized that I accidentally created a checkpoint (in Hyper-V) about 1 year ago, so right now I have a VHDX file that is 530GB and an AVHDX file that is 303 GB. My hard drive is 1TB in size, with now only 50GB of free space.

I am a relative neophyte in VM management, so pardon my ignorance in advance: In order to free up my disk space, in my preliminary research it looks like I have to delete the checkpoint. However, I read that deleting the checkpoint will result in Hyper-V merging the AVHDX and VHDX files, which means that I need, in my real-world example, 303GB of free disk space for the merge to complete successfully. Is this correct?

If so, then since I am unable to do that, I read that I can use V2V Converter to "solve" my issue.. is this correct? If so, what do I exactly need to do?

Also, am I also able to "solve" my issue using Hyper-V manager (I am using Windows Server 2016)?

Any help here would be tremendously appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[yaroslav (staff)]

Hi,

Thanks for your question. V2V does not solve it for you; P2V ran inside the VM might help.
Merging checkpoints is not in StarWind Support's scope. I believe that you can solve it in Hyper-V Manager (it is the only place but Powershell you can merge the checkpoint). Make sure you have a backup (backup and restore is another workaround), and merge.

The best, I believe will be double-checking the merge process in details with communities on Reddit, Spiceworks, or Technet.