How to merge related vmdk files into one?

Question

VMware

It costs Vmware vSphere 5.5, it has a virtual machine. A snapshot was taken almost immediately after installation.
And now it turned out that there is a parent file vm.vmdk, which simply lies in the folder with the machine, and vm-00001.vmdk, which is specified as a disk for the virtual machine, and this disk has become thin-provision, although the parent was created as thick. If you connect the parent file, then there will be data at the time the snapshot was created, i.e. all changes were written to the second vmdk.
I deleted the snapshot with the help of the manager, but everything remained as it is. Then we almost lost all the data when vSphere died and had to be rearranged, and after the VM transfer, the links between the vmdk files were lost, the IDs were overwritten. I had to edit it manually, but that's the way it is, the lyrics.
I read that this can only be done by a clone or migration, that in this case the files are first "merged", then they only migrate, for example, to a neighboring disk, we do not have a second machine.
But how it is technically done, I can not understand.
With Hyper-V, in a similar case, migration of the machine helped, in vSphere I don’t find such simple tools in the interface, but I navigate enough in the console to complete the manual. There is only a "consolidate" button in the snapshot manager, but what it will "consolidate" if it does not see snapshots, I don't want to experiment.

Answer 1

I googled it myself ... The advice from the official KB helped - create a new snapshot and then delete it. In about half an hour, everything was consolidated into one file without interrupting the operation of the machine itself. Hooray!

Answer 2

When I deleted a snapshot, I got the message "it is impossible to delete files, there is not enough disk space." Although the place was full.
Complete cloning of the virtual machine helped. (the clone will have new MACs)