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.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=10051