Storage vMotion fails for virtual machines with multiple disks in different datastores

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VMware vSphere ESXi

Symptoms:

When performing a storage vMotion of a virtual machine disk, if there is a disk with an identical name on the target datastore or the virtual machine has multiple disks with same name on different datastores, while the provisioning.relocate.enableRename is set to true in the vCenter Server, the operation fails with the following error message in vSphere Client:

Cannot complete the operation because the file or folder VM_NAME.vmdk already exists
In vCenter server, you see the error:

A general system error occurred: Failed to start disk migration
The vmware.log of the affected virtual machine contains entries similar to:

YYYY-05-10T14:50:55.816Z| vmx| SVMotion: scsi1:1: SVMotionUndoNameReservation: Failed: disk 'VM_NAME.vmdk' has a non-zero size
YYYY-05-10T14:50:55.816Z| vmx| SVMotion: scsi1:1: SVMotionOpenDisk: failed to remove name reservation for destination disk
YYYY-05-10T14:56:35.802Z| vmx| Migrate /vm/#_VMX/vmx/migrateState/cmd/##1_14be10/op/ failed with error: Failed to start disk migrations. (-1)

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0

This issue occurs when a virtual machine has been created with multiple disks in different datastores, the disks are given the same name by default.

This is a known issue affecting vSphere 5.0 and 5.1.

This issue is resolved in:

vCenter Server 5.0 Update 3. For more information, see VMware vCenter Server 5.0 Update 3 Release Notes.
vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1. For more information, see VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 Release Notes.

To work around this issue, use Storage vMotion to perform one of these options:

Migrate each virtual machine disk to the new datastore one at a time.
Migrate all virtual machine disks to a new directory that does not contain any existing related virtual machine disks.

For more information about provisioning.relocate.enableRename value in vCenter Server, see vSphere 5.x Storage vMotion does not rename virtual machine files on completing migration (2008877).
If the virtual machine disks are named differently to begin with, setting provisioning.relocate.enableRename to false will also ensure that the errors in the symptom sections do not occur.
Note that once provisioning.relocate.enableRename has been created in vCenter, the key is renamed to config.provisioning.relocate.enableRename. So if you are looking for this setting in vCenter, you need to look for config.provisioning.relocate.enableRename.
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