Migration of VM’s with snapshots from a vSAN ESA 8.x datastore may result in inconsistencies under certain specific conditions

Products

• VMware vSAN 8.x

Issue/Introduction

In vSAN ESA 8.x environments, under certain conditions, migrating VMs from a vSAN ESA datastore using operations such as Storage vMotion, XvMotion, Cold Relocate or Clone may result in inconsistencies at the destination datastore. This issue is specific to vSAN ESA and not applicable to vSAN OSA.

Environment

VMware vSAN ESA on 8.x before 8.0 U3b

Cause

In vSAN ESA environments, migrating virtual machines with native snapshots from a vSAN ESA datastore to any other datastore using Storage vMotion, XvMotion, Cold Relocate or Clone may result in inconsistencies. These inconsistencies can impact both the snapshot and the running VM at the destination. Symptoms of this problem may include the VM failing to boot up at the destination.

The conditions under which this issue occurs vary, depending on factors such as VM workload patterns and snapshot timing before migration. 

Resolution

vSAN ESA 8.x is strongly recommended to be upgraded to 8.0 U3b immediately to resolve the issue detailed in the KB.