While trying to remediate some VMs to upgrade VM tools and HW version, I discovered a handful which will not power on. The vSphere client prints an error like:
Cannot power On vmName on
vmHost. Unable to access file <unspecified
filename> since it is locked
error
11/3/2009 9:54:28 PM
I have an 8 machine cluster with VMs stored on one of several iSCSI LUNs. I checked the vmware.log file for the offending VM, noted which file was actually locked, executed vmkfstools -D /path/to/datastore/vm/offendingFile.vmdk and checked for the uuid to print in /var/log/vmkernel. I took that and compared it with the system uuids for all the hosts I have in my cluster. None of the hosts have a matching UUID. I checked all the hosts and none of them have a process open for that VM, nor do they have the file locked according to lsof.
So far, all of the affected VMs have nested snapshots, and the affected file(s) are intermediate deltas. So we can jump back to an earlier point with the VM, but will lose however much work occurred post-offending-snapshot.
What else can I try to find where these locks are being held? Is there a command which I can use to just tell ESX that I want it to override the lock for these files?