Sunday, 25 August 2013

VMware consolidating disks fails with file lock error

Recently I came across an issue where I had a VM with lots of snapshot and delta disks but when you look in the snapshot manager there are no snapshots.

There is a nice little message in the vSphere client pointing to the issue.

When I attempted to consolidate the disks I got a horrible error, one of those VMware mystery errors.

"Unable to access file since its locked"

Super! Thanks VMware.

A bit of googleing around led me to a stack of articles talking about backup VM's having the disk mounted causing a file lock. I knew this was not the problem since this is a lab environment and there is no snapshot backup tool.

It did lead me to look on the array for file locks though. This is on a NetApp array so I ssh'd in and had a poke around.  I checked for locks on all of the files in the VM's directory and no matter what I entered I kept getting 'No Locks'


OK, so its not an array level file lock, what next?

I turned on SSH on a host that has access to the files, CD'd to the VMs directory to have a look around. The first thing I noticed that struck me as odd was 2 files starting with .lck-.

Since the VM was powered off these should not be there. So I rm'd both files and tried the consolidate again. HUZZAH!! its working.



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