consolidate fails: unable to access file since it’s locked

When consolidating a VM I got : unable to access file since it’s locked.

Found an excellent explanation : https://www.vmadmin.co.uk/resources/35-esxserver/411-disk-consolidation-needed-unable-to-access-file-since-it-is-locked

But I wanted to see if a simple storage vmotion would help too. So I did a vmotion to another host and storage and it works !