Unable to dismount a datastore

[BarrieS3004]

I am trying to dismount datastores from an old Dell Equallogic SAN we are in the process of decomissioning and getting the following error saying that the 'resource is in use'. (See attached). I assume this occurs when something is still on the data store and I can see a heap of folders and files in there named .locker of various dates, one has lots of log files. (see attached). I tried to delete these files and ESX does not allow it as shown in the 3rd screen shot. I believe this had to be done before removing the ISCSI connection which it didn't let me do as the data store was in use. Is there a simpler approach to deleting old datastores for an old-ish dell SAN? Any tips would be appreciated ! I have seen other references for this issue but nothing for an EqualLogic SAN.   Forgot to mention, the evironment is this VMware ESXi, 6.0.0, 3620759

[maksym007]

Have you tried to check if in vCenter any VM is "using" that storage? 

Try to remove that VMs from inventory. 

Otherwise you will need via cli remove datastore forcefully. 

[a_p_]

To me this looks like the scratch location has been redirected to the storage.

In this case you need to change the ScratchConfig.ConfiguredScratchLocation for each host.

See https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.5/com.vmware.vsphere.install.doc/GUID-6A4FCA6C-498C-4080... for details.

André

[BarrieS3004]

Thanks will have a look at this.

[BarrieS3004]

That was the first thing we did and no there were no VM's, only those pesky .locker files.

Thing is, we don't need these but they won't delete, as the SAN is being decomissioned.

If we can't detatch from the GUI is it possible to do it from the command line and safely ?

[BarrieS3004]

Thanks for your earlier comments, is there a command line method to remove the locker files?