Error: "Failure to add all required permission" while hot adding disks to virtual machine

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Adding a new or existing disks to running virtual machine fails with either of,

1. A general system error occurred: Failed to add all required permissions
   OR
2. A general system error occurred: Could not apply reconfigure/migrate domain changes

The error occurs after several reconfigurations of host add and remove of disks.   

Cause

This failure is seen when Host Management Agent encounters an error during to add/update virtual machine file access policies for the newly added disks. In cases where virtual machine disk layout is incomplete, new effective policies are not generated resulting in the policy update failure. 

Events similar to the following can be seen in Host management agent logs (/var/run/log/hostd.log) confirming the incomplete disk layout.

Skip caching of external disk paths due to incomplete layout.
Event 5473 : Some of the disks of the virtual machine <VMNAME> on host <HOST_NAME> failed to load. The information present for them in the virtual machine configuration may be incomplete
Skip config check due to incomplete disk layout

Resolution

This issue is currently under investigation and a fix will be delivered in a future ESXi Server patch/update release. 

As a quick workaround migrate the virtual machine to another ESXi Server. This refreshes the disk layout and hot add will succeed. Alternatively a snapshot create/delete operation will refresh the disk layout on the same ESXi Server avoiding further hot add failures. 

Additional Information

Note: Virtual machine disk layout remains incomplete if any of the disks attached to the virtual machine is not present or inaccessible. The disk layout is not refreshed even in cases the accessibility is restored or virtual machine configuration is corrected.