Virtual machine disk consolidation fails with error "Failed to copy source VMDK to destination VMDK : I/O error"

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Disk consolidation for a virtual machine fails, displaying this error in the Tasks and Events log:

Failed to copy source (/vmfs/volumes/<datastore-uuid>/VM-DIRECTORY/VM_Name-000001.vmdk) to destination (/vmfs/volumes<datastore-uuid>/VM-DIRECTORY/VM_Name.vmdk): I/O error. An error occurred while consolidating disks: The operation failed. Consolidation failed for disk node 'scsi0:0': The operation failed. Failed to get copy progress while consolidating disks from '/vmfs/volumes/<datastore-uuid>/VM-DIRECTORY/VM_Name-000001.vmdk' to '/vmfs/volumes<datastore-uuid>/VM-DIRECTORY/VM_Name.vmdk'.

Environment

VMware vSphere 7.x

VMware vSphere 8.x

Cause

The disk consolidation failure is caused due to underlying storage issue.

IO errors can be seen in /var/run/log/vmkernel.log:

2025-10-01T23:54:06.456Z cpu43:3843113)WARNING: SVM: 2869: scsi0:0 Failed SVMFDSIoctlMoveData: I/O error
2025-10-01T23:54:06.677Z cpu45:3842709)WARNING: SVM: 2990: scsi0:0 copyBitmapInfo already cleaned up. Failing request to set copyBitmap
2025-10-01T23:54:19.181Z cpu17:3843115)WARNING: SVM: 2869: scsi0:0 Failed SVMFDSIoctlMoveData: I/O error
2025-10-01T23:54:19.273Z cpu35:3842709)WARNING: SVM: 2990: scsi0:0 copyBitmapInfo already cleaned up. Failing request to set copyBitmap
2025-10-01T23:54:31.876Z cpu9:3843117)WARNING: SVM: 2869: scsi0:0 Failed SVMFDSIoctlMoveData: I/O error

Resolution

This issue requires involving the core storage team to fix the IO errors. 

Please engage the Broadcom storage team(if required), please see Creating and managing Broadcom support cases