svmotion fails on vm's with disks which are configured with full path

[spacejay]

Hello all,

I tried to migrate all of my vm disk's to a new datastore using the new feature svmotion of ESX 3.5. This works fine for the most of my vm's. Sometimes the migration fails with an error: Received an error from the server: A general system error occurred: failed to copy VM config to VMotion dest (vim.fault.InvalidDeviceBacking)

I found out that the migration only fails on vm's which have disks which are configured with a full path like this: scsi0:0.fileName = "/vmfs/volumes/45b7a65c-ae6c9661-9fb8-00151715aa2e/folder/disk.vmdk" In this case also the disk in the VI Client is unavailable.

After changing the file path to scsi0:0.fileName = disk.vmdk everything works fine.

The problem is, I have to shutdown and remove the vm from the inventory in order to update the disk path.

My question is now. Is it possible to change this disk path from full to relative without shutting down the vm?

Regards,

Christian

[dominic7]

That unfortunately sounds like a bug which you should open an SR for. To answer your other question there is no way to change the disk path without shutting down the VM to my knowledge.

-Dominic

[asteel]

The issue for me was definitely with the absolute path in the VMX file. On 3.5i, I had a VM that had not been started for some time. When trying to do svmotion, it would fail with the vim.fault.InvalidDeviceBacking error. After changing the file path from absolute to relative, svmotion worked fine.

Thanks.