Unable to resize a Cloud Director Availability protected virtual machine's disk in vSphere 6.7 or older

Products

• VMware Cloud Director
• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
When you attempt to resize a disk of a virtual machine that is currently being replicated via Cloud Director Availability, you see errors similar to:

Invalid or unsupported virtual machine configuration.
vSphere Replication does not support changing the length of a replicated disk.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 6.7.x
VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.x
VMware ESXi 6.7.x

Cause

This is an expected behaviour when attempting to resize a protected virtual machine in vSphere 6.7 or older.

Live disk resizing feature was added in Cloud Director Availability 4.0 and requires a minimum of vSphere 7.0 in the source site, where the protected virtual machine is located.

Resolution

This issue is resolved in both vCenter 7.0 and ESXi 7.0, available at VMware Downloads.

For more information, see the VMware Cloud Director Availability 4.0 Release Notes.

Workaround:
To work around this issue if you do not want to upgrade, disable the replication before resizing the virtual machine's disk. Once the virtual machine's disk has been resized, you can protect the virtual machine again.

To minimize the initial synchronization data transfer on reconfiguring a replication while resizing a virtual machine, resize the protected virtual machine using the following method:

1. Log into the Cloud Director Availability Provider Portal.
2. Fail over the virtual machine and untick the Power on Recovered VMs option.
3. After the failover has completed, delete the replication.
4. If not performed during the failover, consolidate the recovered virtual machine.

Note: Consolidation tasks in Cloud Director can only be performed by a System Administrator user.

5. Resize disk of the original virtual machine on the source site.
6. Resize disk of the recovered virtual machine on the destination site.
7. Configure a new replication for the original virtual machine.
8. In the Settings view of the New Incoming/Outgoing Replication wizard, enable the Configure Seed VMs option.
9. In the Seed VM view of the wizard, select the recovered virtual machine to use as the seed.
10. Complete the replication configuration to reprotect the original virtual machine.