Unable to commit snapshots because files are locked.
I recently had an issue where the backup software had left a snapshot on the vm, which wasn’t visible in the snapshot manager. Usually to get rid of this you would just snapshot the machine again, and the process would re-create the missing links. Deleting the snapshots would then take the machine back to its usual state, happy days. However this time that didn’t work, I could create snapshots, but couldn’t then commit them, resulting in a few snapshots being overlaid, but not showing up in the snapshot manager. This was on ESXi 4.1, the backup software was VEEAM 5.
I did a bit of searching online, and found a couple of ways to remove the file locks which were showing up when trying to commit the snapshots. The first option I tried was simply to disable the backup software which I thought might have the lock on the files. Because of the situation I was unable to reboot the VM that was running the backup software. This might have worked, but I don’t know for sure.
Next was to restart the management agents on the host. Given I wasn’t onsite I wasn’t able to go in through the normal console, and restart the agents, luckily you can do the following.
- Connect using the vSphere Client
- Clicky on the Configuration Tab
- Clicky on the Security Profile link
- Properties
- Remote Tech Support (SSH)
- Options
- Start