vSphere: Virtual machine Consolidation Needed status

Today I opened vSphere Client and one VM was yellow marked with warning sign.

This warning reported:

Virtual machine Consolidation Needed status



Right click on VM, Open Snapshot Manager and check if there are active snapshots

In my case no active snapshots were found so I decided to furtherly investigate to verify the presence of possible orphaned snapshots.
Edit Machine Settings, go to Hard Disk properties and verify that the virtual machine is not pointing to the base disk (in my case this VM points to DISK-000005.vmdk)

Browsing datastore on which this VM resides also confirmed this theory.
As you can see there is a snapshot file not recognized (orphaned) by Snapshot Manager.

This issue need to be solved asap since orphaned snaphots if unnoticed can quickly fill datastores. Right click on VM, Snapshot -> Consolidate



Wait for completion, this could take a while depending on the size of snapshot.

NOTE: In my case consolidation failed returning a file lock error as I will explain in detail in my next post!!