Encountered a failure while attempting to perform a vMotion migration between ESXi hosts within the same cluster.

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

This article provides steps in resolving vMotion validation errors for virtual machines stored on datastore.

Symptoms:

• Cannot validate vMotion.
• vMotion validation fails.
• You see the error:

Error :  

• Unable to access virtual disk 'Hard disk 1' from the host. Either the host is disconnected from the datastore or has insufficient privilege.  Details: Unable to access file [datastore_1] vmware1/vmware1.vmdk  
• Unable to access the virtual machine configuration: Unable to access file [datastore_1] vmware1/vmware1.vmx

 

Environment

ESXi 7.x

Cause

The vMotion operation failed because the shared datastores were not mounted on the destination ESXi host. Consequently, the host was unable to access the virtual machine’s configuration (.vmx) and virtual disk (.vmdk) files, resulting in the migration failure.

Although the datastore appeared as mounted in the vCenter UI, upon verifying directly through the ESXi host UI, the following error was observed:

Resolution

Ensure consistent storage visibility across the cluster by mounting the required shared datastores on the destination ESXi host via the host UI.

Steps to Perform the Mount Operation:

1. Log in to the ESXi Host Client (UI) using the appropriate credentials.

2. Navigate to Storage > Datastores.

3. Select the datastore that needs to be mounted.

4. Click on Actions and choose the Mount option.

5. Confirm the operation and verify that the datastore is successfully mounted.

Additional Information

Once the missing datastores were mounted on the destination ESXi host via the UI, vMotion was retried and completed successfully without errors. This confirmed that the lack of datastore access was the root cause of the issue.