One morning while reviewing a vSphere 5.1 cluster at a customer location, I noticed one VM with the following message “Configuration Issues. Virtual machine disks consolidation is needed”.
Figure 1
A few days before, a snapshot was made as part of a regular update process. At the end of the day the snapshot was deleted. Apparently, something went wrong.
VMware KB 2003638 “Consolidating snapshots in vSphere 5.x” details the backgrounds for this message and also presents a solution for resolving this issue. Right-click the virtual machine and from the menu, choose Snapshot > Consolidate.
So far so good, but some moments later, a new message was received and the consolidation task was ended.
Figure 2
Adventures in a Virtual World 