Opening disk on second scsi controller using VixDiskLib_Open fails with error: You do not have access rights to this file

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides best practice tips when using multiple SCSI controllers on a VDDK hot-add proxy.


Symptoms:
When using Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) during a backup, if the hot-add of backed up disks exhaust the targets in the first SCSI and overflows to other SCSI controllers, the backup may fail with this error:

You do not have access rights to this file.

Environment

Virtual Disk Development Kit 5.1
Virtual Disk Development Kit 5.5

Cause

To support backup of multiple virtual machine, you may need more than one SCSI controller to hot-add the backed up virtual machine disks to the proxy virtual machine.

The backup operation may fail with the error if:

• additional SCSI controllers are not configured to include dummy/actual disks
  
• SCSI controllers are not added in order

Resolution

To avoid the error when you do not have access rights to this file, add dummy/actual disks to each of the additional controllers.

Note: Dummy/actual disks must be added to the SCSI controllers in sequential order.

For example:

• Hard disk 1 on the Hotadd Proxy is added to scsi 0:0
• Hard disk 2 should be added to scsi 1:0
• Hard disk 3 should be added to scsi 2:0

A challenge is presented when attempting to remove and re-add the hard disks when dealing with a Windows hot add proxy.

Windows hot add proxy will already have the SCSI ports created in the Windows registry for the hard disks that were already added to the virtual machine. By removing the hard disks, the Windows registry is not automatically updated to reflect the changes.

Complete these steps as a best practice. VDDK uses the SCSI ports configured in the Windows registry to perform the hot add operation.

1. Restart the Windows Hot add Proxy virtual machine after removing the hard disks and the SCSI controllers using virtual machines edit settings. Now extra scsi ports configured for the removed hard disks will not be visible.
2. Re-add the hard disk in order. For example, first to scsi 1:0 and then to scsi 2:0.
   Re-adding the disks in sequential order ensures that the SCSI ports created in the Windows registry point to the correct SCSI controllers.
   

Additional Information

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