I'm having this trouble (this is the second time now) where I cannot power on a virtual machine. The message "Unable to access file since it is locked. Since the filename is unspecified, it makes it hard to figure out what the issue is.
I have 3 ESX4 hosts in a cluster. I moved everything off of host 2 to host 1 (except the affected machine), and then reboot host 2. Upon power up the VM still will not start. It gets to 95% and then that specified error message displays.
What I originally tried to do is resize the disk of the particular machine. I wasn't able to since it was thick provisioned, so I used the vmware converter and moved it to host 3 with a new name. Well when the converter finished I could not start either of the VM's (the original, or the one with the slightly smaller disk). So I thought the new converted machine was causing the issues, so I deleted it. Well now I can't even power on the original.
This isn't the first time this happened. After a using vmware converter to get a P2V done a few days ago, I couldn't start up the new imported virtual machine. I forget what we rebooted and in what order it was done. Don't rememver if it was the vcenter server that we rebooted, or if it was the affected host.
Thanks for the suggestions. It seems as if this "locked" file is the Achilles heel of our VMWare implementation. If only there was a way to handle files so they wouldn't arbitrarily lock. Although that's a discussion in another computing topic.
Thanks!
Are you sure that the VM is not still running on a different ESX host, or that the machine running the P2V is not still locking the files?
Try use the datastore browser to rename the folder that the VM is in and re-add the VM to inventory?
What storage are you using? If you are using NFS, make sure there are no NFS locks on the vmdk.
It's an iSCSI lun on an EMC Clariion.
I'm rebooting the vcenter server which is where I initiated the V2V conversion to see if that helps.
It doesn't show the VM running on a different ESX host. I'll wait and see when vcenter comes back up.
Thanks.
OK, that did it.
The vcenter infrastructure server must of held the process open. If that's all I have to do, reboot it, then ok. Everything is running fine now.
Still would take suggestions if there's any way around rebooting. vcenter server boots quickly though, so if that's what I gotta do, then that's what I gotta do.
Find the solution in the following link:
http://tipstricksandmore.blogspot.com/2010/02/solved-unable-to-access-file.html
It really solves the problem.
Cheers.
This KB article should help identify the file that is locked when getting that error in the future. http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=10051&slic...
-C
Hi there, I had the same issue action below fixed my issue. Good luck