Unable to access unspecified file since it is locked

Today we had some problems with snapshots that were hanging on the vms that were being backuped. Strange errors occured where we were unable to delete the snapshot (title error) or the snapshot was hidden.

This guy provided the solution. For us it was fixed after rebooting TSM, creating a new snapshot and then choosing the delete all option

However to quickly check all the vms i wrote a small powercli script so that we could quickly identify the machines that were having the problem. It is quite easy but might help you in moments of stress ;)

[regex]$disksnap = "[-][0-9]{6,6}[.]vmdk"
foreach($vm in (get-vm))
{
 $first = $true
 foreach($disk in ($vm.harddisks | select filename))
 {
  if($disk.filename -match $disksnap)
  {
   if ($first)
   {
    $first = $false
    write-host "-----------------------------"
    write-host "VM Name  : "$vm.Name
    write-host "Snapshot : "
    $snaps = $vm | get-snapshot
    foreach($snap in $snaps)
    {
     write-host $snap.name
    }
   }
   write-host ">   "$disk.filename
   
  }
 }
}

I one case, rebooting TSM was not enough. The fix was to restart the mgmt agents. This seems to clear the TSM agent after which we could consolidate the snapshot again.

(In ESXi you can do this via ssh using "services.sh restart")

BTW; some time ago I had some vms having some disks referencing delta disks. The only solution was cloning the disks via vmkfstools

vmkfstools -i "/vmfs/volumes/Datastore/examplevm/examplevm-000001.vmdk" "/vmfs/volumes/Datastore 2/newexamplevm/newexamplevm.vmdk"

Before you delete the disks from the vm (to configure the clone disks)
-Make a note of the scsi controller type
-Make a note of the order on vSCSI controller (disk 1 -> 0:0, disk 2 -> 0:1,...)