VM Power on fails with error "Unable to create virtual SCSI device" Module DevicePowerOn power on failed.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0
• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

• Unable to Power on Secondary Node of a WSFC Cluster
• The WSFC is on Clustered VMDK datastore

Error: While Power on the VM:
Unable to create virtual SCSI device for scsi1:0, '/vmfs/volumes/<datasore-UUID>/VM_Name/VM_Name_1.vmdk' Failed to start the virtual machine. Module DevicePowerOn power on failed.

Environment

vSphere 7.x , 8.x

Cause

Cluster in a Box (CIB) configuration is not supported for clustered vmdk disk.

Resolution

• Move the secondary WSFC Node to other host in the cluster except from the host where the Primary Node is already running and then try to power on.

Note: DRS may try to power on the VM on the same host if there are no affinity rule set for keeping both the VM running on different Host, in such scenario migrate the affected WSFC Node to other Host and power it on from the host client directly.

 

Additional Information

Make sure all the guidelines and supported configurations are matched as per Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) with shared disks on VMware vSphere 8.x: Guidelines for supported configurations

Limitations of Clustered VMDK support for WSFC:

Clustered VMDK support is only possible with the following limitations:

• Cluster in a Box (CIB) configuration is not supported.
• Spanned VMFS datastores cannot store clustered VMDKs.
• A physical LUN with a clustered datastore cannot have any additional VMFS datastores.
• On-line Storage vMotion and snapshots are not supported.
• Only disks with 512 sector size are supported.
• VMFS5 and earlier are not supported for storing clustered VMDKs.
• Only datastores connected through Fibre Channel (FC) are supported in this release.
• Clustered VMDK datastore cannot be used as an ESXi installation disk.
• Diagnostic partition is not supported on disks that are marked clustered.
• SCSI-2 reservations are not supported on clustered VMDKs.
• Hot expansion of a VMDK that is associated with a clustered VM is not supported.
• Moving more than one node of WSFC to the same ESXi host is not allowed and causes vMotion to fail. You must use anti-affinity DRS Rules to separate VMs and nodes of the cluster on different ESXi hosts.
• Cloning and Fault Tolerance are not supported.

Reference Document: Limitations of Clustered VMDK support for WSFC