How to unlock the VMDK file VM's disk files are lock down frequently

[sureshasai]

Hi,

How to unlock the VMDK file VM's disk files are lock down frequently

how could i unlock the VM's ? and how to prevent that

[rsk007 · Accepted solution]

Cause:

This issue occurs due to a number of reasons:

• The common reason would be a powered on virtual machine contains locks on all files in use by the owning ESXi host to facilitate read and write access.
• Other locks may be created by hot-adding disks to snapshot based backup appliances during the backup process.
• Failure to create a lock / start a virtual machine can occur if an unsupported disk format is used or if a lock is already present.

for more information please find VMware KB below:

Troubleshooting issues resulting from locked virtual disks (2107795)

Investigating virtual machine file locks on ESXi (10051)

Finding the lock owners of a VMDK or file on a VMFS datastore in VMware ESXi 5.5 P05 and later (2110...

[sureshasai]

HI,

Thanks for the guidence.

[zappit]

ESXi 5.5 host with Windows Server 2016. Repeat power outages.

It was far too time-consuming to try to repair the locks, edit files, and so much more. The company was down and thank God there was a quick fix.

Note this is a stand-alone ESXi 5.5 server. Troubleshooting the problem I ended up upgrading to 6.0

I got additional errors "failed to start the virtual machine. module disk power on failed. cannot open the disk"

Quick fix. In a panic to save time, I copied the .vmdk file over to a new folder, and the older corrupted .vmx~ which was replaced with a newer .vmx version. 

I copied the 200GB .vmdk file and the previous .vmx version (which was named .vmx~ and slightly larger/older than the new one) into a new folder.

I created a new instance from the web interface via "Register an Existing" vmguest. Not sure if this would have worked on version 5.5. In this huge mess since I upgraded to 6.0 and used the web interface in an attempt to import the corrupted image.

Starting the Windows Server 2016 instance it asked if I Copied or Moved it. I selected "Copy".

My Windows Server 2016 came up to do maintenance/repair within the WIndows 2016 light blue screen. Then after Win2016 attempted to repair, it did so and booted fine. 

I got this idea from the previous post to copy the image to a workstation and use VMWare Workstation to try and repair one of the three error messages I was receiving. I had a damaged image, locked files, a failed snapshot, etc.