Storage vMotion fails with "Cannot move a VM with native delta disk backing"

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

1) In the vCenter UI, we see the below error during compatibility check:

• Cannot move a VM with native delta disk backing.

• Datastore does not satisfy compatibility since it does not support one or more required properties.

2) The affected VM will be configured with snapshot.alwaysAllowNative=TRUE running on a snapshot disk and hosted on a NFS Datastore.

• The snapshots of the affected VM are created using fast file clone technology, also called native NFS snapshots.

• NAS Arrays that support vSphere APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) uses native NFS snapshots to make virtual machine snapshots

For more information regarding native NFS Snapshots, refer vSphere documentation .

Environment

VMware vSphere 6.x
VMware vSphere 7.0.x

Cause

Disks in NFS datastore with VAAI would use native NFS snapshot technology on snapshot creation. VAAI doesn't have a primitive to allow us to "get allocation bitmap", the information about which blocks have been changed versus the parent snapshot. Without such info, we can't reproduce the disk hierarchy in a separate location. So we don't support such disk chain to be migrated out of its NFS datastore location.

Resolution

This is an expected behavior, As per design storage vmotion of a virtual machine with native delta disk backing is not supported from vCenter.

Workaround:
Currently there is no workaround.