Disk Consolidation Fails with "IO was aborted by VMFS via a virt-reset" Due to HLU Mismatch

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• Disk Consolidation Failure: Attempts to consolidate virtual machine disks fail for one or multiple VMs.

• vCenter Error: The task fails in the vSphere Client with a generic timeout message:

  Consolidation failed for disk node 'scsi0:x': The operation failed.

• ESXi Host Logs (vmkernel.log): The logs show repeated virt-reset errors, indicating that the storage subsystem is actively aborting I/O requests due to non-response:

  IO was aborted by VMFS via a virt-reset on the device

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x, 8.x

Cause

This issue is caused by a Host Logical Unit (HLU) ID mismatch resulting from mapping conflicts on the underlying storage array.

Resolution

1. Audit SAN Storage Groups: Log into your storage array management interface and review the storage groups/masking views presenting the affected datastores.

2. Remove Stale Hosts: Permanently unmap and remove LUN access for all legacy, decommissioned, or offline ESXi hosts.

3. Verify HLU Consistency: Ensure that the LUNs are presented with a consistent, identical HLU ID across all active ESXi nodes in the cluster.

Removing the legacy hosts from the storage masking configuration eliminates the mismatched HLU presentations. This immediately resolves the array's access conflicts and enables the ESXi hosts to successfully complete disk consolidation tasks.

Additional Information

Broadcom KB 308306: Mismatch between LUN and Host ID when LUN is presented to clustered ESXi hosts from multiple storage groups