Somehow, a colleague of mine put an ESX host in a cluster into maintenance mode while VMs were still running. Or maybe it just happened to crash when she was about to do this. I don’t know how, and I’m not sure I still believe it, but I saw some really weird stuff last week. the end result was that VMs powered off ungracefully, and the host became unresponsive, and things were generally bad. We started adding VMs back to other hosts, but one VM had locked files. Check out this entry at Gabe’s Virtual World on how to address this, but basically you want to ps, grep and kill -9 some stuff.

ps -elf | grep vmname

kill -9 PID

And you’ll find that it’s probably the vmdk files that are locked, not necessarily the vmx file.