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AndrewP27
Contributor
Contributor

Snapshot Consolidation - Cannot remove locks

Hi,

We have a VM that will not allow us to consolidate the snapshots. Get the usual message "Unable to access file since it is locked". I should say the VM is powered off and currently will not power on as that gives the message "Failed to lock file" and stops.

Prior to doing this i stuck the host that the VM sits on into maintenance mode, let DRS migrate servers off then rebooted it. When that did not work i started to look at a couple of knowledgebase articles on how to clear this and getting nowhere very quickly. Looked at these;

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2107795

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/84475

Tried to follow them through and from what i can see there are some locks held on this VM on a different ESX host within the cluster

ls | while read x; do vmfsfilelockinfo -p $x| grep -i "is locked"; done
"VMSERVER-000001-delta.vmdk" is locked in Exclusive mode by host having mac address ['2c:76:8a:b0:b4:7a']
"VMSERVER_1-000001-delta.vmdk" is locked in Exclusive mode by host having mac address ['2c:76:8a:b0:b4:7a']
"VMSERVER_1-flat.vmdk" is locked in Read-Only mode by host having mac address ['2c:76:8a:b0:b4:7a']
"VMSERVER_2-000001-delta.vmdk" is locked in Exclusive mode by host having mac address ['2c:76:8a:b0:b4:7a']
"VMSERVER_2-flat.vmdk" is locked in Read-Only mode by host having mac address ['2c:76:8a:b0:b4:7a']
"VMSERVER_3-000001-delta.vmdk" is locked in Exclusive mode by host having mac address ['2c:76:8a:b0:b4:7a']
"VMSERVER_3-flat.vmdk" is locked in Read-Only mode by host having mac address ['2c:76:8a:b0:b4:7a']

This MAC matches a different host to the one that the VM sits on. So i went off tried to find any process locking by following these KB articles and could not. So i stuck it into maintenance mode, waited while DRS migrated VM's off then rebooted the host which should surely have cleared the locks?

Well it has not and i am still unable to consolidate the snapshots.

I was wondering if anyone had some ideas or links to other KB articles which might help me in clearing all locks for the VM so i can consolidate the snapshots and stop getting alerts.

Thanks

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a_p_
Leadership
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Only a quick guess. Do you have a VM based backup application in place? If so, please check whether the backup server, or one of its proxies has the VM's virtual disks still mounted.

André

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