HCX Bulk migration for Oracle RAC cluster VMs are failing

Products

• VMware HCX

Issue/Introduction

• There are specific methods that must be observed based on the clustering services such as Microsoft or Oracle RAC.
• The shared disk will have the multi-writer flag enabled.  While the migration will appear to have succeeded, the formerly shared disk will no longer have the multi-writer flag enabled. It will likely have corrupted or incomplete data as well.
• A bulk migration using VMware HCX for an Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) VM failed. The target environment utilizes shared virtual disks with the multi-writer flag enabled for node clustering. The migration can fail with following error
  

   com.vmware.vim.binding.impl.vmodl.LocalizableMessageImpl@6343cc41 ], reason = VMware ESX cannot open the virtual disk "/vmfs/volumes/<Datastore-name>/<VM_name>.vmdk" for clustering. Verify that the virtual disk was created using the thick option. }' Please try these actions manually

 

Environment

VMware HCX 

Cause

HCX does not support migrations of shared disks. 

Resolution

Manually re-provision the virtual disks at the destination as Eager Zeroed Thick. This ensures that all physical blocks are zeroed and allocated, satisfying the vSphere clustering requirement. For a multi-writer disk shared among multiple RAC nodes (VMs) on VMware vSphere, the virtual disk must be formatted as Eager Zeroed Thick Provision (EZT). This is a non-negotiable requirement for using the multi-writer flag. For more information, see A virtual machine fails to power on with the error: Thin/TBZ disks cannot be opened in multiwriter mode. VMware ESX cannot open the virtual disk for clustering. . 

Additional Information

Restrictions for Bulk Migration

Reference article https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/313527