HCX migration completes successfully, but error "Failed to delete disks on target side" is displayed in the UI

Products

• VMware HCX

Issue/Introduction

• When performing virtual machine migration using RAV (Replication Assisted vMotion) or Bulk Migration with HCX, the error "Failed to delete disks on target side" appears in the UI events column.

• The virtual machine migration itself completes without issues and the VM is operating normally.
• The "Enable seed checkpoint" option is enabled in the migration settings.

• A previous attempt to migrate the same virtual machine failed before the successful migration execution.
• The user manually deleted the virtual machine disks or folders on the target datastore that were created by the failed migration.

Environment

VMware HCX

Cause

This is expected behavior due to the design of HCX migration functionality.

When "Enable seed checkpoint" is enabled, virtual machine disks created on the target datastore during a failed migration are retained, considering they may be reused during the next migration retry.

If these disks are no longer required during the next migration, they are automatically deleted after the migration completes.

If these disks have been manually deleted, this automatic deletion cannot be performed, and the error message is displayed.

Resolution

This error message can be safely ignored in this scenario.

No issues will occur as long as the virtual machine migration is complete and no unnecessary disks remain.