ANSWER:

Although this isn’t really a “fix” as such, and may not be of use to a production server, when I’ve been faced with issues like this in the past I find the easiest solution is just to use Vmware converter to v2v the machine, this provides an identical machine with a single vmdk per disk and is done with an agent within the VM, rather than at the hypervisor level, so it isn’t aware of snapshots.

by Alex Berry from http://serverfault.com/questions/408924