I am in the need of recovering some diskspace and getting a handle on some of our VM Sprawl. I have several VM's that have multiple snapshots that are showing up as orphaned vmdk's. Many of the snapshots are 6+months old. I know I can get rid of them. I have only ever done a consolidation once (on our mail server) and it apparently queced the system for 20mins at the very end (bring down email for that time, and unexpected result, thank goodness it was after 6pm, but we are a 24x7 healthcare shop).
We are on a mix of 4 and 5, most of our hosts are on 5, so I do have the consolidation option in VCenter as opposed to going command line. But what can I expect? What is the best process for consolidating or deleting the unused snapshots to recover space?
Can I perform this action during peak business hours or off hours?