After disk consolidation failed to power on virtual machine

[mike4054]

My previous posts have been marked as spam, but I don't know why. So I'll try it again with that one.

I've deleted an old snapshot, shut down the VM (while it was deleting), and created a new snapshot while the VM still was powered off. And because there was a message to consolidate the disks, I've started the consolidation. After a while the consolidation has stopped with a "failed" message. Now power on of the VM is not possible any more and disk consolidation neither. What could be a good approach to solve that problem?

[mike4054]

I've searched in the forum and the internet for similar problems. As I can see, there are lots of different reasons (and solutions) related to that problem.

The error Message is:

Failed to power on virtual machine. Unable to enumerate all disks.

The log and the vmx file is attached here.

The files in the folder are looking like this:

total 738862208
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 76.0K Aug 17 23:06 .
drwxr-xr-t 1 root root 76.0K Aug 17 20:44 ..
-rw------- 1 root root 60.4G Aug 17 20:27 nextcloud03-p-000001-sesparse.vmdk
-rw------- 1 root root 324 Aug 17 20:24 nextcloud03-p-000001.vmdk
-rw------- 1 root root 4.0G Aug 17 20:28 nextcloud03-p-000002-sesparse.vmdk
-rw------- 1 root root 331 Aug 17 20:28 nextcloud03-p-000002.vmdk
-rw------- 1 root root 276.2K Aug 17 20:28 nextcloud03-p-Snapshot2.vmsn
-rw------- 1 root root 1.0T Aug 17 20:27 nextcloud03-p-flat.vmdk
-rw------- 1 root root 264.5K Apr 9 23:27 nextcloud03-p.nvram
-rw------- 1 root root 537 Nov 14 2021 nextcloud03-p.vmdk
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 600 Aug 17 20:28 nextcloud03-p.vmsd
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3.3K Aug 17 23:06 nextcloud03-p.vmx
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 87.8K Jan 24 2021 vmware-1.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 88.0K Jan 24 2021 vmware-2.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 454.1K Apr 9 22:59 vmware-3.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 229.8K Aug 17 20:27 vmware.log

Thank you very much in advance.

Cheers

Mike

[a_p_]

Please compress/zip the 3 small .vmdk descriptor files, and attach the .zip archive to a reply post.

André

[mike4054]

Thank you very much for your support! Here it is....

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

This looks a bit unusual to me, and in this case I'd actually prefer to drop the latest snapshot (~4 .0 GB) if that's ok with you.
However, to ensure that there's a way back to the current state, another temporary snapshot should be created.

Action plan:

1. edit the VM's .vmx file and set the scsi0:0.fileName to "nextcloud03-p-000001.vmdk"
2. reload the .vmx file by following the steps in https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1026043
3. create a new snapshot
4. power on the VM to see if everything works as expected

If everything is ok, you may then "Delete All" snapshots, and finally delete the remaining (now obsolete) snapshot files "nextcloud03-p-000002-sesparse.vmdk", and "nextcloud03-p-000002.vmdk" from the datastore.

André

[mike4054]

Merci André

Yes, I think it's unusual because I did several operations within a short time or probably there was even a conflict somewhere in the background that was not visible on the GUI.

I'll try this action plan and will post the results here. Many thanks in advance! I'm currently copying all the files from that folder to a backup folder just in case...

In general I was thinking about an approach like that but I don't understand the mechanism in detail, so I just left everything in place instead damaging something.

[mike4054]

Many thanks! It works. That saved many hours! How can I pay you for your great support? 🙂

[kashifkarar01]

Just FYI: May the disk consolidation was still in progress instead of manual method you can still use the CLI and monitor if consolidation is completed or is in progress based on that you can do the next (Clone or snapshot . Reference on monitoring : https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2146232

[mike4054]

good idea! thank you!

[a_p_]

>>> How can I pay you for your great support?
Paid with thanks! You're welcome.

André