Cannot start/power-on virtual machine when snapshot consolidation is running.

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

If a VM is powered offline/shutdown while disk consolidation is running, the VM will not power-on while the snapshot consolidation process is running.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5 U1 - Build: 5310538 or above
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7
VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 9.x

Cause

This is expected behavior of the snapshot consolidation task currently running on a VM when it is powered off.

Note:  There is no supported way to stop snapshot consolidation and attempts to do so may result in data corruption.

Resolution

Option 1

Wait for the snapshot consolidation process to fully finish before attempting to power on the VM.

Option 2 

Restore the VM from backup to a new VM object (example of "VM_NAME_Restored").  In some cases this may be quicker than waiting for the disk consolidation to complete and get the VM powered online.  This will require additional storage space, processing on the target storage and may still require disk consolidation be run at a later point.

Additional Information

Consolidating/Committing snapshots in VMware ESXi
Best practices for using VMware snapshots in the vSphere environment
Unable to power on a virtual machine after cancelling snapshot consolidation