we have a Windows Server 2012 R2 running Hyper-V with a Gen1 VM. This VM was setup for replication with "create additional hourly recovery points" with setting of 24. Things had been just fine until replication broke. I didn't notice this for awhile and it said the VM needed to be resynced. I did this and it completed but I'm noticing the hard drive on the host that holds the .vhdx file also has 19 .avhdx files waiting to be merged into the .vhdx.
I know I could shut the VM down and wait for them to merge but its showing there are 4.5TB of .avhdx waiting to be merged which will take hours, if not a couple days. The other issue is the drive on the host has 11 TB but only 2.5 TB free. I don't know if I'd run out of disk space while things are merging.
It seemed like having replication on is continuing to cause the .avhdx files to grow. I paused the replication for now. What is my best option to get things back to normal? If I remove replication, will the files automatically merge without having to shut the VM down? Some of these .avhdx files are from before I resynced and some of them are from after. Do I need to do a live migration to another host that has enough storage to do the merge? Or something else? Is it safe to turn off the setting to maintain additional recovery points or will that not accomplish anything at this point?
