Deleting virtual machine snapshots that have locked files

Here are a few issues you might experience while working with the vSphere environment with regards to snapshots of your virtual machines.

There might be times when you have snapshots created but have the following issues:

• You are unable to have the snapshot committed
• The snapshot commits with no errors and everything looks fine in the snapshot manager, but there are still snapshot disks in the virtual machine's directory that can't be removed
• You experience errors/failures from your backup solution because of the snapshot file that was not deleted during the snapshot commit

If you check the /var/log/hostd.log file on the ESXi host, you will find a message similar to the following:

If you attempt to remove the datastore, not knowing of the previous problem you will receive an error similar to this:
The resource '<VMFS-UUID>' is in use. 

Another snapshot issue you might have running on vSphere 5.0 or above is when...