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 6.0
VMware vCenter Server 6.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 5.5.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
VMware vCenter Server 5.1.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5

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. For more information, see Using Tech Support Mode in ESXi 4.1, ESXi 5.x, and ESXi 6.x (1017910).
2. Run the command below to change SETransientErrorRetryCount to 50 (Default value is 5). 

  esxcfg-advcfg -s 50 /SE/SETransientErrorRetryCount