Unable to Delete Orphaned Veeam CDP Replicas via vCenter UI

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

When attempting to delete a Continuous Data Protection (CDP) job from Veeam, the associated virtual machine is not cleaned up within vCenter. Attempting to manually delete the orphaned VM directly from the vCenter UI results in the following error: "Deletion of virtual machine failed. Files might be remaining on the datastore."

Testing confirms that this issue is isolated to the vCenter management plane. Bypassing vCenter and managing the datastore directly from the ESXi host (e.g., via SSH or WinSCP as root) allows the files to be deleted successfully without any errors. Issue also only occurs on VMs being managed by third party replication software.

Environment

vSphere 7.x

vSphere 8.x

Cause

This issue is caused by a third-party integration or API communication failure.

Because the replica files can be successfully deleted directly at the ESXi host level, and only replica related VMs exhibit the issue, it confirms that the underlying VMFS datastore and storage stack are healthy and functioning as designed and issue resides outside of the vSphere stack. 

Resolution

Engage VM replication vendor.