First of all, I want to thank everyone here for all the help and resources, without all your help I wouldn't have been able to make the switch to ESXi.
Now, some background before I dwell into my current issue. I'm the sysadmin for a medium sized company, our infrastructure uses two ESXi hosts (no vCenter, just two standalone hosts) with about half a dozen VMs on each (domain controllers, print server, UniFi controller, ESET Remote Adminitrator, SQL server, etc.). Both hosts are exactly alike (HPE ProLiant ML110 gen9's, 48 GB of RAM on each, a RAID1 for the main datastore plus an SSD for the swap datastore).
I backup all the VMs about once a week using Veeam Backup & Replication Free Edition, VeeamZipping them into packages on external storage. This has worked without any problems so far.
I don't usually take snapshots of the VMs except when making important changes, such as prior to installing a new SQL instance. When I do take snapshots though, I make sure to delete them and consolidate the disks after I confirm that everything is working. I don't want to store any cruft, I want clean and lean VMs.
Yesterday I upgrade both hosts to ESXi 6.5U1 (from 6.5). Everything went OK, no error messages whatsoever. There was one oversight though: I forgot to delete some snapshots from one VM prior to the update.
All the VMs work, except for one in which I cannot remove any snapshots. Windows boots just fine and everything works, but I receive errors while trying to delete all the snapshots and when trying to consolidate the disks. I read about something regarding the CDROM drive that could impact the process if they're connected to an ISO image. It was, but the problem persisted even after removing the mount.
I tried to create a new snapshot to see If it'd worked. It did; but I cannot delete it. I VeeamZipped the VM to see if I could, and I was able to back it up. Veeam did ended the job with a warning saying that it wasn't able to delete the temporary snapshot it created for the job, which I then confirmed in the Snapshot Manager in the ESXi UI.
The message I received when trying to delete all snapshots is the following:
Failed - A general system error occurred: vim.fault.GenericVmConfigFault
And the one I get when trying to consolidate:
Failed - Unable to access file since it is locked
An error occurred while consolidating disks: One of the disks in this virtual machine is already in use by a virtual machine or by a snapshot.
Things I tried so far:
- Tried removing the snapshots with the VM on and off. No luck.
- Rebooting the ESXi host with the troubled VM. No luck.
- Restarting my workstation, which runs VeeamZip, to see if it had anything to do with it. No luck.
I read several articles online regarding this problem and quite frankly I'm a bit overwhelmed. I don't know where to start, everyone seems to be having this problem in different scenarios and setups, none of which apply to mine.
Here are some screenshots if it's of any help:
The VM in question:
The error popup:
And the description:
The current snapshots:
Contents of the datastore:
I will appreciate all the help I can get. Thank you