Independent-persistent disk is changed to Dependent disk following SVMotion

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• When a virtual machine with disk mode as Independent-Persistent with thin/thick(eager/lazy) provisioned disk is storage vmotioned by explicitly selecting the disk formats i.e thin/thick(eager/lazy) the disk mode changes to "Dependent".
• When we check the logs under /var/run/log/vmkernel.log, we would see the below :

2018-10-17T13:50:20.890Z info hostd[2099739] [Originator@6876 sub=DiskLib opID=605162f4-1b01-4b8a-a6e2-64f2d72b2288-3880829-auto-3880830-h5c:70114089-6f-01-fe-0b95 user=vpxuser:DOMAIN\user] DISKLIB-LIB : Failed to open '/vmfs/volumes/xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-5b145ce/VMNAME/VMNAME.vmdk' with flags 0x80005 The file specified is not a virtual disk (15).

2018-10-17T13:50:20.890Z info hostd[2099739] [Originator@6876 sub=DiskLib opID=605162f4-1b01-4b8a-a6e2-64f2d72b2288-3880829-auto-3880830-h5c:70114089-6f-01-fe-0b95 user=vpxuser:DOMAIN\user] DISKLIB-DSCPTR:/vmfs/volumes/5xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-5b145ce5b5b145ce/VMNAME/VMNAME_1.vmdk: Cannot open disk descriptor "DescriptorOpenInt" because it is an empty file. This could be due to a buggy s/xvmotion workflow.

2018-10-17T13:51:05.477Z info hostd[2099990] [Originator@6876 sub=Libs opID=605162f4-1b01-4b8a-a6e2-64f2d72b2288-3880829-auto-3880830-h5c:70114089-6f-01-95-0d2d user=vpxuser:DOMAIN\user] OBJLIB-FILEBE : FileBEOpen: can't open '/vmfs/volumes/5xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-5b145ce5a145cd/VMNAME/VMNAME.vmdk' : Could not find the file (393218).    

 

Note: When a virtual machine with disk mode as Independent-Persistent and thin provisioned disk is storage vmotioned using "Same format as source" for the parameter under "Select the format for the virtual machine's disks" , the disk mode remains the same as it was in the source datastore.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7

Cause

When we change the source virtual machine’s disk Mode to 'independent_persistent' and sVMotion it, the destination is also expected to have the same disk Mode (unless explicitly specified otherwise).

Resolution

This issue is resolved in VMware vCenter Server 6.7 Update 2 Release and later. To download go to Customer Connect downloads page.

Workaround:

To work around the issue, please remove the disk from the virtual machine and then add it as Independent-persistent disk.

Note - VMware ESXi 6.7 has reached EOL and is out of support. We would encourage you to upgrade to the latest versions of ESXi.