Failed write command to write-quiesced partition with "error IO was aborted by VMFS via a virt-reset on the device" in VMware ESXi

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

vCenter/vSphere Client reports errors similar to:

ScsiDeviceIO: 3075: Failed write command to write-quiesced partition naa.600################8e111

 

The var/run/log/vmkernel.log messages contains entries similar to:

cpu16:4971)ALERT: ScsiDeviceIO: 3075: Failed write command to write-quiesced partition naa.600################8e111:1

cpu16:4971)Fil3: 13359: Max retries (10) exceeded for caller Fil3_FileIO (status 'IO was aborted by VMFS via a virt-reset on the device')

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x

Cause

This message is logged for write operations when an ESXi host needs to stop I/O to a device/LUN. A Virtual Device Reset is used to stop the I/O to maintain data integrity.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, investigate the reason why the host issued the Virtual Device Reset.

Typically, there are SCSI or other storage related errors before the virt-reset error message. These errors indicate the reason why the host needed to stop the I/O.

Example of errors that may precede a virt-reset condition: var/run/log/vmkernel.log

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS cpu8:4104)ScsiDeviceIO: 2316:Cmd(0x412401bede80) 0x2a, CmdSN 0x17af1 to dev "naa.600################8e111" failed H:0x8 D:0x0 P:0x0 Possible sense data: 0x0 0x0 0x0.

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS cpu12:4108)ScsiDeviceIO: 2288:Cmd(0x412440f9b240) 0x8a, CmdSN 0x17af2 to dev "naa.600################8e111" failed H:0x8 D:0x0 P:0x0 Possible sense data: 0x0 0x0 0x0.

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS cpu20:19244)WARNING: J3: 2644: Error committing txn callerID: 0xc1d00006 to slot 0: IO was aborted by VMFS via a virt-reset on the device

 

In the above example, the I/O is being aborted as there is no response from the fabric or storage array to I/O requests, which is likely an underlying storage issue. This results in a virt-reset as I/O needs to be stopped on the VMFS file system.

Additional Information

For related information, see:

Interpreting SCSI sense codes in VMware ESXi and ESX