VM Consolidation fails due to lock (4036627)

VM Consolidation fails due to lock

During the backup of the VM a snapshot was made, then the base disk of target VM was hot-added to the VM that handles the backup or VMware Backup Proxy - (NetVault/vRanger/Various other backup softwares that use hot add. The backup has completed, but in the case of this issue, it has most likely failed. So as a result of this, the hot added disks were not removed from the VMware Proxy, nor was the snapshot. This is what causes the base disks of the VM being backed up to be locked, thus the failure when trying to consolidate.

This issue can by fixed by employing either of these two methods:

1. Power off the VMware Proxy. Go to 'Edit Settings' on your VMware Proxy and check for the attached disk(s), you should see extra disks here (affected VMs disks). From here, remove/unlink the hot added disks from the VMware Proxy.  Do Not Delete the Disks, Only remove them from this Virtual Machine. Power the VM back on and run the consolidation again.

Once disks are unlinked from the backup software VM then you need to run Snapshot consolidation on affected and this time it will consolidate all snapshots to base disk and complete without any issue.

2. In this method Storage vMotion the affected VM to another datastore (Right click on VM => Migrate => now you need choose migrate disks to another available datastore – this will clear lock on disk files of the virtual machine.
Now run the Snapshot consolidation and it will complete without any issue.