Just before the Christmas break, Citrix has released the first updated for its XenServer 5.5, which introduces a number of improvements and addresses a critical issue with the LVHD snapshots:
When LVHD snapshots are deleted, disk space is reclaimed by freeing unused snapshot data. This is provided automatically by XenServer while VMs continue to run. However, there is a known limitation in the 5.5 implementation of this feature: when all snapshots are deleted for a given VM’sdisks, some disk space allocated to these snapshots may remain. To address this limitation, Update 1 includes an ‘Off-line Coalesce’ tool that can reclaim all disk space previously allocated to deleted snapshots while the VM is temporarily set offline.