Storage vMotion of a RDM fails with Error: "Failed to start SvMotion. Error during disk setup"

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

When running a storage vMotion task on a powered on virtual machine, you experience these symptoms:

• The storage vMotion task fails while trying to change the pointer file to another datastore.

• Multi-writer enabled (Oracle RAC Server) where multi-writer is supported and the SCSI bus sharing is set to Physical

• When performing a Storage vMotion on a physical-mode RDM to relocate the pointer (RDM mapping) file to a different datastore, the operation may fail with an error similar to the following:

   

  “A fatal internal error occurred. Failed to start SvMotion. Error during disk setup.”

   

Environment

VMware vCenter 8.x
VMware ESXi 8.x

Cause

With physical mode RDM, the VM is directly accessing the LUN, bypassing VMFS disk handling. There is nothing vCenter can “relocate”, so disk setup fails immediately before performing the actual Storage vMotion

Resolution

• A Physical Mode RDM (pRDM) cannot participate in Storage vMotion.
• This is unsupported. However, there are ways to repoint the RDM disk on to another datastore. Please follow the below KB for reference:

Reference:
Migrating virtual machines with Raw Device Mappings (RDMs) 
Migrating virtual machines with Raw Device Mappings