Consolidating snapshot failed: failed to get allocated sector bitmap with 'Device or resource busy'

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Failed to consolidate snapshot.
• VMDKs configured as SESparse (larger than 2TB).
• In the vmware.log, you see entries similar to :

<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time>Z| Worker#0| I120: OBJLIB-FILEBE : FileBEIoctl: ioctl operation failed on '/vmfs/devices/cbt/1a23b4c5-cbt' : Device or resource busy (1048578)
<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time>Z| Worker#0| I120: DISKLIB-VMFS :VmfsSparseExtentCommonGetAllocatedSectorChunks: ObjLib_Ioctl failed 0x100009
<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time>Z| Worker#0| I120: DISKLIB-LIB_MISC : DiskLibGetAllocatedSectorChunksInRangeInt: failed to get allocated sector bitmap with 'Device or resource busy' (1048585).
<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time>Z| Worker#0| W110: Mirror: scsi0:0: Failed to get allocated sectors: Device or resource busy.
<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time>Z| Worker#0| W110: Mirror: scsi0:0: Mirror_SendBitmapToKernel: Failed to send allocated bitmap to VMkernel

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0

Cause

• Internal transient error in getting the bitmap interface for the SESparse disks repeated.
• Transient error occurs irrelevant of system configuration. 

Resolution

To workaround this issue, increase the number of retries on transient errors as following :
 

1. Open a console to the ESXi or ESX host.
2. Run the command below to change SETransientErrorRetryCount to 50 (Default value is 5). 

  esxcfg-advcfg -s 50 /SE/SETransientErrorRetryCount