"An error occurred while consolidating disks" when deleting one or more snapshots or consolidate disks

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• When deleting one or more snapshots or consolidating disks, you see this error:
  
  An error occurred while consolidating disks: Reason
  
  Where Reason is one of these:
  • Failed to lock the file
  • One or more disks are busy
  • A required file was not found
  • Input/output error.
  • The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created. The content ID of the parent virtual disk does not match the corresponding parent content ID in the child.
  • There is not enough space on the file system for the selected operation.
  • The system cannot find the file specified
  • msg.snapshot.error-FAIL

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.7.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.5.x
VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.0.x
VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.5.x

Resolution

This table provides error, cause of the error, and the corresponding resolution:

 

Error	Cause	Resolution
Failed to lock the file   or   One or more disks are busy	To prevent concurrent changes to critical virtual machine files and file systems, ESXi/ESX hosts establish locks on these files. In certain circumstances, these locks may not be released when the virtual machine is powered off, thereby causing this error, when the virtual machine is powered on later in the cluster.	To resolve this issue, see Investigating virtual machine file locks on ESXi (10051).
A required file was not found   or   The system cannot find the file specified	This issue occurs if a virtual disk file or its snapshot disk is not present at the path specified in the virtual machine's configuration file.	Ensure that the missing virtual disk file is restored at the path specified. Ensure that the virtual disk files configured for the virtual machine were not accidentally deleted or moved to a different location and that the datastores containing these virtual disks are accessible and mounted at the correct locations.   For more information, see Verifying ESX/ESXi virtual machine file names (1003757).   To see if it is applicable to your setup, see Powering on a virtual machine on an upgraded host fails with the error: File [VMFS volume] VM-name/VM-name.vmdk was not found (2036572).
Input/output error	This issue occurs if ESXi host has a problem accessing the underlying storage devices or data stores.	Troubleshoot and resolve any issues with the underlying storage devices: Troubleshooting LUN connectivity issues on ESXi/ESX hosts (1003955) Troubleshooting fibre channel storage connectivity (1003680) Troubleshooting ESXi/ESX connectivity to iSCSI arrays using software initiators (1003952) Troubleshooting connectivity issues to an NFS datastore on ESX and ESXi hosts (1003967)
The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created.   or   The content ID of the parent virtual disk does not match the corresponding parent content ID in the child	This issue occurs when snapshots are in a bad state, either through manual intervention or through a system failure.	To resolve this issue, resolve the CID mismatch error.   For more information, see "The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created" error (1007969).
Consolidate virtual disk files Error msg.snapshot.error-FAIL		VM consolidation failed during the backup process and it will invoke an error, this kind of requeries manual consolidation Consolidate Snapshots
There is not enough space on the file system for the selected operation		Free up space on the datastore(s) holding the virtual machine configuration files and virtual disks.   Alternatively, increase the size of the datastore on which the virtual machine is located. For more information, see the vSphere Storage guide.

 

 

Additional Information

VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics for vSphere - FAQ

• To monitor the snapshot consolidation process or estimate time remaining, see Estimate the time required to consolidate virtual machine snapshots
• If there is no space on the datastore while committing the snapshot then power off the VM and perform the same task, as power off VM doesn't update the track and additional snapshot files are not created while deleting the snapshot (as per process)
• Once the consolidate activity started, it should not be canceled as this may lead to data corruption 

Verifying ESX/ESXi virtual machine file names
"The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created" error
Powering on a virtual machine on an upgraded host fails with the error: File [VMFS volume] VM-name/VM-name.vmdk was not found
Unable to delete the virtual machine snapshots