Investigating a locked VM using ESXI Shell.

When you try to power on a machine you will receive a message "Unable to access a file since it is locked"

I found the best way to fix this is to migrate the VM to another host.

To investigate whether the VM is locked you would need to open a shell session to the host that the VM is located on.

the following command shows the full directory path:

ls /vmfs/volumes/UUID/VMDIR/VMNAME.vmx

once you have the correct path use the following:

vmkfstools -D /vmfs/volumes/UUID/VMDIR/LOCKEDFILE.xxx

Please see the following link for more details.

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