Could not power on VM - lock was not free

The other day we experienced an incident on the SAN storage with high latency and even loss of connection to the SAN. This can generate a lot of really unpleasant errors on the ESX hosts. Even after the SAN is brought back to a stable state we've seen hosts that won't boot, VM's that won't vMotion and VMs that won't power on due to file locks. 

If you receive a 'locked file error' (like screendump below) and your VM won't boot there are a couple of ways to go about it. This VMware KB article explains it quite well. Either you can cold migrate the VM to the  other hosts in the cluster (to find the ESX host with the lock) and then try to boot it from there or you can try to locate specifically which host has the lock.

If the vCenter log does not tell you specifically which files are locked, this can be viewed in the vmware.log which is located in the VM folder. If you just tried to power on the VM, then relevant info should be at the end of the log file.

In the example below, it is the swap that is still locked.

This can be verified by running the touch command on the locked file.
With vmkfstools you can get the mac address that has the lock:

# vmkfstools -D /vmfs/volumes///

In the screendump below, the MAC address has been highlighted.

The same info can be found in the /var/log/vmkernel log

Once you have the MAC address you can find a match by, for example, logging in to vCenter or onto the Blade enclosure. When you have a match, cold migrate the VM to the relavant ESX host and boot it.