How to remove write lock in SCVMM

If you are administering System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) you probably came to that point, that you received the following error message below as a job result:

"Unable to acquire a 'Delete' lock on object 'c216053f-22c8-4135-aaa5-53a017a254e5' of type 'VM' because it is locked by task '896ef157-fa79-4fb3-9ed0-294f7d75ce21' 'Unknown' with a 'Write' lock."
SCVMM error message

Normally, SCVMM automatically resolves a write lock. But in some cases, the write lock can’t be removed. In this case, the only way to remove the write lock is to manually delete it from the database.

!!! Please make sure you back up SCVMM database first !!!

Open SQL Management studio and connect to SCVMM database. Run the following query to double-check the write lock: (replace TaskID with the ID in your error message!)

select * from tbl_VMM_Lock where TaskID = '896ef157-fa79-4fb3-9ed0-294f7d75ce21'

If this query returns an output, you can run the following query below to manually remove the write lock: (replace TaskID with the ID in your error message!)

exec prc_VMM_ReleaseAllLocksByTaskID '896ef157-fa79-4fb3-9ed0-294f7d75ce21'

The write lock should have been removed now.

In my case, one VM was in state “Under Migration” although migration already has been finished. A manual failover to another Hyper-V host within the cluster didn’t refresh the state in SCVMM. After manually deleting the write lock, SCVMM was able the refresh the VM state again.

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