I ran into an issue when removing snapshots from a vm through vic. I wasnt paying attention to available space on the datastore and it ran out, which after a long 40 minutes caused the removal to fail and left my datastore with no space. To free up space I went to the datastore and found a vmsn file and deleted it directly. What are the ramifications of directly deleting a VMSN file from the datastore? Everything appears to be running fine.
The snapshot state stored in the vmsn file is now gone. So everything will appears as normal but you'll have some issues if you try to revert to that snapshot.
To understand the ramifications of this read:
Understanding virtual machine snapshots in VMware ESX
Rick Blythe
Social Media Specialist
VMware Inc.