Disk consolidation in NFS Datastore fails with "Unknown error (5)"

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

1. In an NFS Datastore, you're unable to consolidate/delete all snapshots.

2. The consolidation/deletions fails both manually and via backup appliance.

3. In the vmware.log of the affected VM, you see below.

 

Er(02) vmx - ConsolidateFillSnapDiskTransferArray: Failed to fetch disk size of '/vmfs/volumes/<Datastore-UUID>/<VM-NAME>/<VM-NAME>-00000*.vmdk' for consolidate: Unknown error (5)
In(05) vmx - ConsolidateStart: Failure while populating the snapDataPerCombineOperation array: 'Unknown error' (5)
In(05) vmx - VigorTransport_ServerSendResponse opID=<op-ID>: Completed Snapshot request with messages.
In(05) vmx - Turning off snapshot info cache.
In(05) vmx - Turning off snapshot disk cache.
In(05) vmx - ConsolidateEnd: Snapshot consolidate complete: Unknown error (5).

Environment

VMware vCenter Server

VMware vSphere ESXi

Cause

NFS Plugin for VMware VAAI is installed in ESXi server on which the snapshot tasks fail.

Resolution

This is a known issue on ESXi Hosts configured for NFS Plugin for VMware VAAI for NetApp operations.

Additional Information

Customer needs to engage NetApp to fix the issue. To confirm if the NFS Plugin for VMware VAAI is installed in ESXi server, run the below command.

esxcli software vib list | grep -i NetAppNasPlugin