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This does appear to be more of a design limitation than a bug. I wouldn’t necessarily classify it as broken behavior, since the system is technically preventing deletion, but the lack of warning or UI clarity creates an operational hazard.
In enterprise environments, especially with multi-admin teams, silent fails like this result in wasted time, misdiagnosis, and sometimes risk of data loss due to incorrect assumptions. Even a simple confirmation message like: “This volume has associated snapshots and cannot be deleted until they are removed. Please clean up snapshots first.” would dramatically improve usability.
I support the idea of having:
• A clear warning or prevention message in the UI and CLI.
• An option to force delete including snapshots (with admin-level privileges).
• Or at least a queryable flag that alerts automation systems about undeletable state due to snapshots.
This is about making the system more predictable and transparent, which is vital in a good system design.
Thank you for submitting this enhancement request. We have reviewed this request and plan to include it in a future release.
I am surprised this has not surfaced before and had more complaints about this issue. As mentioned below, deleting orphaned snapshots using the CLI and having to use the snapshot identifier can lead to the wrong snapshot being deleted. It can also lead to "out of capacity" issues.
This issue needs to be addressed by IBM as soon as possible. It may have just been an oversight by the IBM programmers that has just come to light by frustrated customers who are using it daily. The problem has been identified, now it needs corrected. This is causing angry customers and frustrated Business Partners because there is nothing they can do to correct the problem. IBM, please step up and investigate this issue for yourselves. We know you have the skills and talent to fix this bug. I believe IBM's dedication to client's success is still alive. This is a perfect time for IBM to stand good on their word and resolve this snapshot problem.
I agree, this seems like a bug that should be fixed. Enough admins fall victim to this on a regular basis that IBM really should address this.
Cheers!
This should be prevented by the UI, as once the volume group is deleted, the snapshots are orphaned and can't be deleted without dropping into the cli and issuing an rmsnapshot command, which also requires you to know the snapshot identifier.
This is not an enhancement but a fix to incomplete software design.