Hot-adding a hard disk to a powered on virtual machine fails with the error: Hot-add of digest enabled disk not supported

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Cannot hot add a hard disk to a powered on virtual machine
• Hot-adding a hard disk to a powered on virtual machine fails
• You see the error:
  
  Failed to add disk scsi1:0.
  Hot-add of digest enabled disk not supported scsi1:0.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5

Cause

This issue occurs if you try to hot-add a virtual disk that has Content Based Read Cache (CBRC) digest enabled to a virtual machine. For more information on CBRC, see the Configure View Storage Accelerator for vCenter Server section in the VMware Horizon View Administration guide.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, power off the virtual machine and then try to add the hard disk.