Virtual Machine Disks consolidation is needed

I arrived at work today and noticed 2 VM’s had a warning indicating “Virtual Machine Disk Consolidation is needed”.  If you following the usual steps and right click the VM in the vSphere Client and click “Snapshot” and then “Consolidate”, the VM will try to consolidate and the I received an error “Unable to access file since it is locked”.  I have seen this error before and knew that my Veeam Proxy Server still had the VM’s hard disks mounted because I use the Hot Add feature to backup my environment.  You will need to edit the Veeam Proxy Servers VM and remove the disks of the VM that needs consolidated from the “Hardware tab”. Make sure you only remove the disks and not remove and delete them or you will be using Veeam for a restore 🙂  After you remove the disks from the Veeam Proxy, you can once again try to “Consolidate” the VM using the previous steps above.  Just be aware that when consolidating, that if the snapshots are large it can take some time and may even cause your VM to become extremely slow or non-responsive.  I would suggest Consolidating your VM after normal business hours just to be safe.