Error: "sector format mismatch with policy sector format" when migrating VMs via storage vMotion

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi
• VMware vSAN
• VMware Cloud Foundation

Issue/Introduction

Migration of virtual machines via storage vMotion between clusters/datastores fails with the following error:

The operation is not supported on the object. Source VM virtual disk '<disk_id>' sector format mismatch with policy sector format. Conversion of disk sector format is not supported for VM clone/migrate/reconfigure and OVF template operations.

Environment

VMware vCenter (All Versions)
VMware ESXi (All Versions)
VMware vSAN (All Versions)

Cause

Storage vMotion, clone, and reconfigure operations doesn't support block-level conversion between different disk sector formats. 

Resolution

Sector format conversion cannot be performed via Storage vMotion, clone, and reconfigure operations. To migrate the workloads with the end goal of changing the vmdk sector format, perform the following procedure:

1. Deploy new target virtual machines on the destination cluster/datastore.

2. Configure the Virtual Machine Hardware level to the version level of the respective sector format you want to convert to for sector compatibility. (For 512n & 512e any VM hardware version, for 4kn VM hardware level needs to be 21 and higher)

3. Provision the required number of virtual disks (VMDKs) with exact sizes matching the source virtual machines.

4. Perform a guest OS-level file copy (e.g., utilizing robocopy for Windows, rsync for Linux) to migrate the data directly from the source virtual machines to the target virtual machines, or perform an application-level backup and restore into the new environment.

Additional Information

• 8.x Device Sector Formats
• 9.x Sector Formats for Storage Devices
• Virtual machine hardware versions