Which behavior should an administrator expect while deleting a large snapshot on a write-intensive database?

When deleting a large snapshot on a write-intensive database, the behavior that an administrator should expect is that ESXi will commit the snapshot delta disk into the base disk. This process involves merging the changes captured in the snapshot with the base disk so that all data is consolidated and the snapshot can be effectively removed from the storage system.

During the snapshot deletion process, the data from the snapshot's delta file—which contains the changes made after the snapshot was created—is integrated back into the base disk. This merging process is essential to ensure that the database remains consistent and that any changes made during the snapshot's lifetime are accounted for in the primary virtual disk. The completion of this operation allows for better performance in the write-intensive environment, as any additional I/O operations will now occur directly against the updated base disk.

This process can be resource-intensive and may impact performance temporarily if many writes are occurring at the same time, but ultimately, the committing of the snapshot delta into the base disk is a necessary step to manage storage efficiently and maintain system integrity.