Virtual Machine Disks Consolidation Needed - How to Fix it!

Having your virtual machines hosted on VMware vSphere servers has a lot of advantages, one of which is easy access to a plethora of server management solutions and advanced VM management tools. VMware vSphere also offers high performance and reliability, provided you’re using a decently specced system to host the VMs.

But even though VMware vSphere is considered one of the best and most reliable virtualization environment platforms, it is not “perfect.” Sometimes, you might see an error message on the VM summary tab that reads “Virtual machine disk consolidation is needed,” this might trigger serious concerns as you wouldn’t like to lose any important data saved on the VM. How do you fix this?

Why Did the “Virtual Machine Disks Consolidation is Needed” Error Appear?

Here are some of the most common reasons why you’re seeing the error message on your VM summary page.

• Insufficient free space on the VMFS datastore for disk consolidation to occur automatically. You need at least 1 GB of free space for disk consolidation.
• Timeouts due to large snapshots cause poor storage performance.
• Temporary network connection problems between the vCenter server and the ESXi host.
• Ongoing VM backup processes by a third-party app or the snapshot files are locked by vSphere. Close all running VM backup processes.
• The virtual machine already has more than 32 snapshots. VMware recommends that each VM has a maximum of 32 snaps.
• There’s an ongoing process of large snapshots consolidating in the background.

How to Fix the “Virtual Machine Disk Consolidation is Needed” Error

There are a couple of ways to clear this error message from your VM’s monitor page. These five methods are the most effective.

1. Consolidate Virtual Machine Disk Files Correctly

Consolidating the faulty VM from the vSphere web client application is the easiest way to fix and clear this error message. Here’s how to do it:

• Log into your vSphere Client and go to the VMs tab
• Select the VM that showed you the error message, right-click on it, and select Snapshots
• Click on the Consolidate context option, and select “Yes” on the pop-up dialogue box. If your snapshots are large, it may take some time for the consolidation to complete.

2. Delete Snapshots in Snapshot Manager

Alternatively, if you have more than 32 snapshots of a VM, you may need to delete some of them as VMware suggests a maximum of 32 snaps per VM. Deleting a snapshot can be done in Snapshot Manager.

• Log into your vSphere Client and go to the VMs tab
• Select the VM that showed you the error message, right-click on it, and select Snapshots.
• Click on “Manage Snapshots” and delete the snapshot you feel like deleting. You can equally delete all snapshots you have recorded by clicking the “Delete All Snapshots” option.

3. Consolidate Snapshot via Command-Prompt

If you’re familiar with the PowerCLI interface and would prefer it over the GUI-based vSphere Client, you can run some commands to commit the problematic snapshot for consolidation.

• Connect to the vCenter server: Connect-VIServer -Server [server name] -Protocol [http] -User [username] -Password [password]
• Confirm the VM that needs to be consolidated: Get-VM | Where-Object {$_.Extensiondata.Runtime.ConsolidationNeeded}
• Consolidate the VM disk of the virtual machine that needs consolidation, in this case, “testVM”: (Get-VM -Name "testVM").ExtensionData.ConsolidateVMDisks()

Note: If more than one VM needs consolidation, you can consolidate all of them using the following command:

Get-VM | Where-Object {$_.Extensiondata.Runtime.ConsolidationNeeded} | foreach {$_.ExtensionData.ConsolidateVMDisks_Task()}

4. Unlock The VM Files and Consolidate The VMDK Using vSphere Client

Another way to work this error around is by unlocking any of the VM’s files that might have been locked by a backup application. Hereunder are the steps to follow:

Hot Tip: You can restart ESXi management agents from the “Troubleshooting Options” in ESXi direct console. For CLI commands, follow below:

• Restart the management agents of the primary ESXi host where the VM is deployed. This is done by connecting to the ESXi host via SSH or using ESXi shell CLI. Run any of these commands to restart the host’s services:
• services.sh restart

or

• /etc/init.d/hostd restart
• /etc/init.d/vpxa restart

• Check for the locked VM files:
• vmfsfilelockinfo -p /vmfs/volumes/vm_datastore/vm_name/vm_name.vmx
• Confirm the path of the VM’s log files in datastore:
• cat /var/log/hostd.log |grep -i vm_name
• Go to the VM directory since you’ve identified the path:
• cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore_name/vm_name
• List ESXi hosts locked by the VM files:
• for i in `ls`; do vmfsfilelockinfo -p $i ;done|grep ‘is locked in\|Host owning the lock\|Total time taken’ | sed ‘s|Host owning the lock on file is||g’|sed ‘s|Total time|—|g’ | awk ‘{print $1}’ |uniq
• Restart ESXi management agents and unlock the VM files:
• /etc/init.d/hostd restart
• /etc/init.d/vpxa restart

Once this is done, you can now consolidate the virtual machine disk files using the vSphere Client app to clear the error.

Tip: Learn how to reset VMware virtual machine!

5. Extend Your Disk Space

Finally, by extending your disk space, you can fix VM consolidation errors. This is because sometimes, the error is shown when there’s less than 1GB of free space for disk consolidation. However, this will require getting a third-party partition management software. Using partition management software, you can further extend the disk capacity of your VMFS volume/partition. The VMFS partition is what stores your VMDK files, which are the virtual hard drives powering your VMs.

Conclusion

The “virtual machine disk consolidation is needed” error is a snapshot-related problem; it can also appear due to low storage space. Thus, by expanding your VMFS partition size or deleting some large snapshots, you should be able to consolidate the VM and clear the error message.

Tip: learn about VMware orphaned VM

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