"Failed to change policy: The virtual disk requires a feature not supported by this program" when Changing VM storage Policy

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

When attempting to change a Storage Policy on a VM you get a failure with the message:

Failed to change policy: The virtual disk requires a feature not supported by this program

And the operation fails.

Environment

vSphere

Cause

The VM is sharing disks with one or more other VM's in a clustered configuration and the operation on the current VM cannot make changes to the disk device due to shared locks.

This can can be confirmed in the vmware.log file with the following message:

YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.SSSZ Er(02) vmx - DISKLIB-LIB_MISC   : DiskLibValidateFilterConfig: I/O filter config cannot be changed on disk opened shared.

 

Resolution

Poweroff all the VM's using that VMDK to make the changes.