Hot-adding a hard disk to a powered on virtual machine fails with the error: Unsupported and/or invalid disk type

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Cannot hot-add a hard disk to a powered on virtual machine
• Hot-adding a hard disk to a powered on virtual machine fails
• You see the error:
  
  Failed to add disk scsi0:0.
  Unable to create virtual SCSI device for scsi0:0, '/vmfs/volumes/datastorename/VirtualMachineHome/VirtualMachineDisk.vmdk'
  Failed to open disk scsi0:0: Unsupported and/or invalid disk type 7. Did you forget to import the disk first?

hard-disk-hot-add-fails

Environment

VMware ESX 4.0.x
VMware ESX 4.1.x

Resolution

This issue occurs if a virtual machine that is meant for VMware Hosted products such as VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion is powered-on on a VMware ESX host.

The underlying format used to store virtual machines on VMware Hosted products differs from the format used to store virtual machines on VMware ESX hosts.

To import a virtual machine stored on a VMware Hosted product to a VMware ESX host, the virtual machine should first be converted using VMware vCenter Converter. For more information on conversion, see the VMware vCenter Converter documentation.

Alternatively, the virtual machine's virtual disk files can be imported to a format understandable by VMware ESX using the command:

vmkfstools -i <HostedVirtualDisk> <ESXVirtualDisk>

Connect to the ESX host using an SSH session or ILO/DRAC to use this command.

Note: To access the command line on an ESXi host, you must enable Tech Support Mode. For more information, see Tech Support Mode for Emergency Support (1003677).

For more information on this method, see the Migrate VMware Workstation and VMware GSX Server Virtual Machines section of the ESX Configuration Guide.