vSAN - Virtual machine disks consolidation is needed caused due to backup softwares

Products

• VMware vSAN
• VMware vSphere ESX 8.x

Issue/Introduction

1. You cannot delete or consolidate snapshots 

2. Unable to access file since it is locked An error occurred while consolidating disks: One or more disks are busy.

Consolidation failed for disk node 'scsi0:0': Failed to lock the file. Failed to create mirror node while consolidating disks from '/vmfs/volumes/vsan:529b1c715942bf01-################/186e1b69-1415-1980-1dbc-############/Shadow-000030.vmdk' to '/vmfs/volumes/vsan:529b1c715942bf01-################/186e1b69-1415-1980-1dbc-############/Shadow-000001.vmdk'.
An error occurred while consolidating disks: Failed to lock the file.,1 ms,12/23/2025, 3:24:14 PM,12/23/2025, 3:24:19 PM,4 s

Environment

VMware vSphere 8.0

Cause

A Veeam backup proxy is a critical data mover component in the Veeam Backup & Replication system, that sits between the backup server and source/target systems (like VMware or Hyper-V) to handle data processing, compression, deduplication, and transfer for backups and replication, offloading work from the main server for better performance, especially in large environments.

VMDKs attached to proxy VMs can result in locks in ESXi, often due to an unexpectedly terminated backup job. Disk locks most often occur when hot-add transport mode is used, and a job fails to properly detach the VMDKs from the proxy server. This prevents subsequent jobs or vSphere operations (like disk consolidation) from accessing the files, which appear as "locked" or read-only

Resolution

Check for file locks using Investigating virtual disk file locks on vSAN

Example:

[root@Host-1:/vmfs/volumes/vsan:529b1c715942bf01-################/53761369-ee8a-eafa-3a6f-############] for file in .*lck; do echo ${file}; vmfsfilelockinfo -p ${file} |grep -i mode; done
.005a2a69-2ab9-bda2-4f10-############.lck
".005a2a69-2ab9-bda2-4f10-5c6f69638fb0.lck" is locked in Read-Only mode by host having mac address ['5a:##:##:##:##:##']
Host owning the lock on file is Host-3.vsan.com, lockMode : Read-Only

1. Find out where the Veeam backup proxy VMs are located within the same vCenter 

2. Edit the proxy VM settings 

3. Check the settings to manually remove any unexpected disks or matching disk that belong to the VM disks that are locked 

4. Remove the VMDKs from this VM without deleting the data and click on OK. 

NOTE: This activity must be done outside the backup activity hours. This will help you distinguish between the actual VMDKs that stuck with the proxy VM versus the VMDKs that the proxy VM is actively using to backup data. 

This will release the Read-Only mode locks from the VMDKs and allow you to delete the snapshots and consolidate disks.