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Title
Virtual machine disks consolidation is needed -
Description
Within VMware virtual machine shows an error of 'Virtual machine disks consolidation is needed' -
Cause
This is caused when either the base disk or a snapshot for the VM is still mounted to another VM within the virtual environment. -
Resolution
(if you do run across this error the Consolidate option from the snapshot menu in VMware will not fix this)
The way that you DO resolve this situation is as follows:
- Open up vSphere and right click the VM that is having the disk consolidation errors.
- Right click the VM and go to Snapshot > Take a Snapshot
- Do a non-memory and a non-quiesced snapshot of the VM (the name does not matter, but you do have to name it something)
- Wait for the snapshot to complete
- Right click the VM that is running the Rapid Recovery core, and go to Edit Setting
- Find the hard disk that references the VM that is getting the disk consolidation error and Remove the disk (DO NOT remove and delete, just remove from virtual machine)
- Once removed right click the VM with the error in vSphere again and go to Snapshot > Snapshot Manager and click ‘Delete All’
- Once the snapshots are deleted the error message should disappear. If they do not it may have other .vmdks mounted to other VMs or perhaps other snapshot anomalies are afoot however this is the most common culprit with an agent-less backups solution active in the environment.
This tends to be caused by limited resources on the vCenter server (specifically RAM) however can be caused by the vCenter and/or Rapid Recovery core rebooting during the course of an agent-less backup. It can also happen (referring to the resources piece) if the request for a snapshot creation/removal takes too long to complete and the application time out period expires.