"Some of the disks of the virtual machine failed to load" after unmounting backup vmdk from Rubrik

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• Virtual machine may or may not be running
• A vmdk backed up by Rubrik has been mounted to a VM from the Rubrik Instant Recovery or Live Mount console
• The backup snapshot vmdk has been removed from the Rubrik Instant Recovery or Live Mount console but shows in the guest OS
• The VM Summary page and Monitor page display the warning

Some disks of the virtual machine ####### failed to load. The information present for them in the virtual machine configuration may be incomplete

• In a Windows guest the virtual disk appears in the Disk Manager as Unknown, Not Initialized, and Unallocated

• In the Datastores page of the VM the Rubrik datastore shows an error mark and Free space as 0 B.

Environment

vSphere - ESXi and vCenter (all versions)

Rubrik Instant Recovery or Live Mount

Cause

The virtual disk presented by Rubrik was not removed from the virtual machine configuration. Entries for virtual disk and datastore no longer presented to the VM persist leading to the error indicating a virtual disk failed to load.

Resolution

• If a Windows guest virtual machine, right click on the Disk in Disk Management and choose "offline"
• Edit the virtual machine settings in the UI
• Remove the problematic disk attachment (do not select to delete the data)
• Verify the virtual disk has been removed
• Verify the datastore is no longer present in the Datastores screen of the VM
• To clear the error displayed it may be necessary to power off, unregister (remove from inventory), and reregister the VM (do not choose delete from disk)

Additional Information

See KB 335224 for information on registering and unregistering VMs