At midday, users report that their line-of-business application running on a Windows Server virtual machine is unusually slow. In the hypervisor you observe that the VM's virtual-disk latency is far above baseline and the shared datastore is 95 % full. Snapshot Manager shows a chain of 12 snapshots, the oldest created six months ago. No other alerts are present. According to recommended troubleshooting practice, which corrective action should you perform first to restore performance while keeping the VM's current state intact?
Create a new snapshot and hot-clone the VM to another datastore before deleting any snapshots.
Use the hypervisor's Consolidate/Delete All command to merge the snapshots into the base virtual disk.
Revert the VM to the oldest snapshot and then delete the remaining snapshots.
Expand the VM's system volume inside the guest OS to create additional free space.
A long snapshot chain forces every write operation to traverse multiple delta files, increasing I/O latency and consuming additional datastore space. The proper corrective step is to consolidate (commit/delete) the snapshots so the delta files are merged back into the base VMDK and removed. Consolidation frees space and eliminates the per-snapshot write overhead while preserving the VM's present state. Reverting to the oldest snapshot would discard six months of data; expanding a guest-OS partition does nothing for datastore usage; and creating another snapshot or cloning before cleanup would worsen the space and performance problem.
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Why do long snapshot chains increase virtual-disk latency?
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What happens when you use the Consolidate/Delete All command in a hypervisor?
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Why is reverting to the oldest snapshot a bad idea in this scenario?