Today while working in our production environment where our monitoring system has generated an alert for one of the vCenter server appliance. The alert was ” disk consolidation needed for server xyz”

On checking the vCenter VM status from management vCenter console I found that there as an yellow warning on the same and selecting the summary tab also confirmed the same error message about disk consolidation.

We are using EMC Avamar backup solution and my guess is Avamar failed to cleanup the snapshot which it took on the vcsa vm after backup.

I tried to consolidate the disk by going to snapshot manager for the vcsa VM and hitting consolidate button but it was failing with error “An error occured while consolidating disks:msgs.fileio.locked”

I was not sure why this error is coming while doing consolidation and while searching for solution I came across this blog where the issue have been addressed.

I performed svMotion on my vcsa vm and then tried disk consolidation and bingo it got succeeded without any issues this time.