Unable to consolidate disk on VM

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Not able to consolidate a VM snapshot.  

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi (All Versions)

Cause

The following error is shown in the vCenter, "Insufficient disk space on datastore. An error occurred while consolidating disks: There is not enough space on the file system for selected operation".

Resolution

The datastore is out of space.  The best solution would be to expand the backing LUN.  Once the LUN is expanded and the hosts recognize the additional free space, the VM should be able to consolidate.  If there are other datastores with enough capacity to hold the VMs, you can also try to storage vMotion the VMs to that swing storage.  Additional information on errors when consolidating snapshots can be found in the following KB.

Errors Consolidating Snapshots