Unable to delete a storage policy

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Attempts to remove a storage policy from the vSphere client fail with the following error.
The selected VM storage policy is in use and cannot be deleted

You cannot delete a storage policy that is in use or if the selected storage policy is associated to a virtual machine. Deleting a storage policy also fails, when the association between a virtual machine and its corresponding storage policy is not removed after you delete the virtual machine.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5

Resolution

Make sure that the selected storage policy is not associated to a virtual machine. You can wait for some time until the Storage Policy Based Management service deletes the association between the virtual machines and the storage policy. The wait time depends on the number of entities to be deleted.
You can also manually restart the Storage Policy Based Management service (vmware-sps) by performing the following procedure.

1. Connect to the vCenter Server Appliance via SSH.
2. Log in as root.
3. Run the command in the SSH client.
   service vmware-sps restart

The VMware vSphere Profile-Driven Storage Service has started.
 

Additional Information

For translated versions of this article, see:

• 日本語: ストレージポリシーを削除できない (2087748)