Cannot do storage vmotion for VCLS VM with error "A specified parameter was not correct: StoragePlacementSpec.vm"

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• You try to do storage vMotion of a vCLS VM with SDRS enabled
• You select change storage only
• As destination datastore you use storage DRS instead a dedicated datastore
• You see the following error "A specified parameter was not correct: StoragePlacementSpec.vm"

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 7.0.x
VMware vSphere 7.0.x

Cause

sVMotion vCLS VM is blocked by SDRS to prevent vMotion of vCLS VM in early 7.0 builds

Resolution

This issue is solved in vSphere 7.0U3 where there's a specific feature released so that you could configure which datastores are used for vCLS VMs, and which datastores are not allowed for vCLS VM.
With this feature, the requirement for manual vCLS sVMotion would be greatly reduced.

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/content/dam/broadcom/techdocs/us/en/pdf/vmware/vsphere/vsphere/vSphere-Release-Notes/vsphere-vcenter-server-703-release-notes.pdf

vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) enhancements: With vSphere 7.0 Update 3, vSphere admins can configure vCLS virtual machines to run on specific datastores by configuring the vCLS VM datastore preference per cluster. Admins can also define compute policies to specify how the vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) should place vCLS agent virtual machines (vCLS VMs) and other groups of workload VMs.

Workaround:
Do vMotion of both Compute and Storage at the same time (use both host/storage change)

Note that there's a known issue where after doing a host/storage vMotion additional vCLS VM might be deployed in some scenarios. This issue is fixed in vSphere 7.0.U3

For two hosts cluster, normally two vCLS VMs are deployed, however when a host does not have vCLS VM a new vCLS VM would be deployed if total number of vCLS is less than 3, because it was not considered the number of hosts in the system.

The addition vCLS VM is not harmful in the cluster and can be left there. If desired, you could delete redundant vCLS VM (any one) on the host with two vCLS VMs.

eg, for a two hosts cluster: one host has one vCLS VM, the other host could wrongly have two vCLS VMs, and you could choose to delete any of both vCLS on the host