Snapshot consolidation - but no Snapshot

[dspringer]

I have a strange behavior with one of the VMs in our IT environment of vSphere. I have been receiving sporadic emails for a few days that one of the servers needs consolidation because there were problems deleting snapshots. Now the mysterious thing: If I check via vCenter or RVTools, there is no snapshot on the server. I even disconnected the server completely from the backups last Friday lunchtime. Even though this meant that the full backup was not created at the weekend. But this morning I received another response:

*** on ***-VCENTER01.***.de needs snapshot consolidation, but all automatic snapshot consolidation attempts have failed.
Most likely reason is a virtual disk being locked by some external process. Please troubleshoot the locking issue, and initiate snapshot consolidation manually in vSphere Client.
Veeam Backup & Replication 12.2.0.334

By the way. Yes, I still need to install an update here... But does anyone have an idea? How can I cut the loop? I briefly considered migrating the server in vCenter for storage and hardware resources. But I'm not sure whether this will help.

[Andreas Neufert]

Hi David,

Sometimes VMware vCenter is not in sync with the snapshot files sitting on disk. To consolidate the snapshots that are not visible, usually you need to create a new manual snapshot (uncheck all the checkboxes from the wizard you do not need consistency and RAM in the snapshot) and then hit the consolidation button to remove all snapshots.

[gustavomeneghini]

Hi David,

If there is more than one host within your Vcenter, it would be a good idea to vmotion the affected VM. This would force the VM files to be re-read.