Lock (lck) files

[mcannella7]

Has anyone every run into this, we use Cohesity to back our VM's and 124/125 VM's have file locks on them. Regardless of the backup system we are seeing lock files across the entire environment.  Any thoughts?  I have NEVER run into this before

[Wonlliv]

Hi McAnnella,

did the previous backup job run successfully?

Are the privileges set correctly to perform the needed actions during the backup process?

[mcannella7]

If I actually browse to the data store you can see the lck file  under each VM.  I have verified it is not permissions at all. I could see this happening on one or 2 VMs but almost all of them. We are running latest version of ESXi and latest version 6.5 for VCSA

[admin]

Check if helps: VMware KB: Investigating virtual machine file locks on ESXi/ESX

If the problem now is just the .vmx file with lock, you can create a new virtual machine and point to the old .vmdk.

Regards,

Randhir

[mcannella7]

The problem is this has happened to all 124 VM's so I don't want to hit everything manually.  (it would take forever

[Wonlliv]

Would try to vMotion the VMs off one host and restart it. The same with all the hosts in the cluster and retry it.

[mikemast · Accepted solution]

Yes I have seen this, it has to do with the backups and the vmkernel still has the lock on the file from the backup.. sometimes because of a vmotion during backup.. or other circumstances.

You will need to verify backuops are complete, and see which host has the file lock and restart management services on the ESX host. and that will release the lock, sometimes I have had to restart management services on every host in the cluster before I could do anything with the files.

This happens with other vendors also. Seems to be more prevalent in busy systems doing allot of storage vmotions during backup windows.

Thank You.

Mike Masters