"vSphere Replication does not support changing the length of a replicated disk." error when changing the disk size of a VM in vCloud Director

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Changing the disk size of a vCloud Director VM that was previously protected by vCloud Availability fails.
• In the vCloud Director Portal, you see an error similar to:

[ ########-####-####-####-##########07 ] Underlying system error:
vSphere Replication does not support changing the length of a replicated disk.
vCenter Server task (moref: task-13390) failed in vCenter Server 'Resource vCenter 01' (########-####-####-####-##########4e).
 - Invalid or unsupported virtual machine configuration.

• In /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/vcloud-container-debug.log on the vCloud Director cell, you see an entry similar to:

2020-01-08 14:27:34,403 | ERROR    | vim-proxy-activity-pool-60 | ReconfigureVmActivity          | [Activity Execution] Uncaught Exception during Activity execution. Recent phase: com.vmware.vcloud.val.inter
nal.impl.ReconfigureVmActivity$ReconfigureVmInVcPhase@2ac0b245 - Handle: urn:uuid:########-####-####-####-##########7e, Current Phase: ReconfigureVmActivity$ReconfigureVmInVcPhase | requestId=ffb64478-95f5-4
1c2-af57-5b81d5120907,request=POST https://vcd.corp.local/cloud/amfsecure,requestTime=1578493645998,remoteAddress=192.168.2.2:52673,userAgent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537
.36 ...,accept=*/* method=vAppService.updateVAppVmWithStorageClass vcd=########-####-####-####-##########f5,task=########-####-####-####-##########14 activity=(com.vmware.vcloud.backendbase.management.system
.TaskActivity,urn:uuid:########-####-####-####-##########14) activity=(com.vmware.vcloud.fabric.storage.storedVm.impl.ReconfigureStoredVmActivity,urn:uuid:########-####-####-####-##########f4) activity=(com.
vmware.vcloud.val.internal.impl.ReconfigureVmActivity,urn:uuid:########-####-####-####-##########7e)
java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: com.vmware.ssdc.library.exceptions.GenericVimFaultException: Underlying system error:
vSphere Replication does not support changing the length of a replicated disk.
vCenter Server task (moref: task-13390) failed in vCenter Server 'Resource vCenter 01' (########-####-####-####-##########4e).
        ...
Caused by: (vim.fault.VmConfigFault) {
   faultCause = null,
   faultMessage = (vmodl.LocalizableMessage) [
      com.vmware.vim.binding.impl.vmodl.LocalizableMessageImpl@1e3ec875
   ]
}

Note: The preceding log excerpts are only examples. Date, time, and environmental variables may vary depending on your environment.

Environment

VMware vCloud Availability 3.0.x

Cause

This issue occurs when the replication has been disabled on the vCloud Availability components but has not been disabled on the ESXi host where the source VM resides on.

Resolution

This is a known issue affecting VMs protected by vCloud Availability.
Currently, there is no resolution.

Workaround:
To work around this issue, disable the replication of the VM on the source ESXi host. For information on how to do this, see Disabling VMware vSphere Replication on a virtual machine through the command line.