I have a VM in our VMware ESXi 4.1 environment that has a ‘phantom’ snapshot. I can see the snapshot file(s) when I browse the data store, but the snapshot is not listed in the snapshot manager.
I tried adding creating a snapshot, which was then referenced in the Snapshot manager, along with ‘Consolidation-Helper-0′ snapshot. I selected the snapshot that I just created and clicked Delete All. this attempted to remove the snap shot, but generated the following error;
I then found that my Veeam Backup & Replication virtual appliance, had independant references to two of the virtual disks that were defined in the VM that has the phantom snapshot.
To resolve this I had to shutdown my Veeam VM, edit settings, and remove (!NOT DELETE FROM DISK!) the disks from the Veeam VM. I was then able to create a snapshot again, then Delete All sanpshots successfully.
Good result, no downtime.