In this article, We are going to have a look for a solution that occurred during storage vMotion. The vCenter console shows error ” VMware Storage vMotion Failed To Create Destination Disks”.
Let’s first have a look on what is vMotion and storage vMotion.
VMware vMotion is a process in which you can migrate a virtual machine from one host to another host without shutting down the virtual machine. Basically It migrates the computing resources such as CPU, and Memory to another host.
Similarly, In storage vMotion, You can migrate virtual machine disk files from one datastore to another datastore without shutting down it.
For both vMotion, there are certain prerequisites that need to be fulfilled in order to complete the task. Let’s talk about storage vMotion prerequisites:
- Virtual machine disks must be in persistent mode or be raw device mappings (RDMs).
- RDM with Virtual Mode- you can migrate the mapping file or convert it to disks.
- RDM with Physical Mode- you can migrate the mapping file only.
- The migration of virtual machines during VMware Tools installation is not supported.
- You cannot move virtual disks greater than 2 TB from a VMFS5 datastore to a VMFS3 datastore.
- The host on which the virtual machine is running must have a license that includes Storage vMotion.
- ESXi 4.0 and later hosts do not require vMotion configuration to perform the migration with Storage vMotion.
- The host on which the virtual machine is running must have access to both the source and target datastores.
- The migration of virtual machines during VMware Tools installation is not supported.
Recently I was working on the storage vMotion activity and it was failing and showing the error message:
Error
Failed to create one or more destination disks. Canceling Storage vMotion. Storage vMotion failed to create the destination disk.Reasons
There could be many causes for storage vMotion failure.
- Destination datastore does not exist
- There is not enough space on the datastore for the selected operation.
- VMKernal networking misconfiguration
Solution
For the first error message, you need to check the datastore availability under your hypervisor. For the third error message, you need to check the VMKernal network settings. If not properly configure do it, continue with the storage vMotion.
For the second error message you need to make sure that your destination datastore has enough space to register and store new disk files coming from migration.
In my case, the datastore was running out of space causing the failure. We requested the storage team to add the storage capacity then proceeded with the storage vMotion that got successful.
Reference: KB2145531
[Also read] How To Migrating Virtual Machines With RDMs