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

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Article ID: 312003

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Updated On:

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.