Tales From A Lazy Fat DBA

Today while starting one of my Test machine/instance which is a part of an VMWare (This Team includes a total of 3 virtual machines) has started giving an error message which reads:

“Cannot open the disk: ‘H:\Machine ………….’ or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.Reason: Failed to lock the file”.

And this error restricts us to open the same machine and kept on throwing the same again and again.

Error:
After reading errors it seems to be related with the locks that machines acquire in VMWare Team environment in order to access resources.

Resolution:
While we start our virtual machines there are many different folders related to locks created which contains .lck (Lock Files) and are used by the machine during the operation i.e M30076.lck, Mx456.lck et.
These locks are dynamic in nature and auto refreshes after some time. So, i removed/renamed all of the lock files (.lck) existed under all of these folder and tried the machine again and as what i’ve expected, it started working back again.

* Note: Performing these steps on PROD systems could be dangerous and can cause serious performance/hang issues. Performing such steps always requires recommendations from the VMWARE support.

Thanks
Prashant Dixit
“Sharing is Good”