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Transfer Type is not showing as SAN while trying to Migrate a VM even though the Hosts have SAN storage configured

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This is another interesting case on which I worked recently where we needed to scratch the surface in VMM to know what the Root Cause was.

 

We were trying to migrate a VMs in SCVMM from one Host to the other Host. And as both the Hosts had SAN storage configured, most of the VMs were showing the correct “Transfer  Type”. But while migrating a few other VMs we could see the “Transfer Type” as “Network” instead of “SAN”:

 

image

 

And we were also getting the Message for “Deployment and Transfer Explanation” as shown above and it said “Virtual Machine resides on a LUN which is not visible to any of the Storage Providers. Which was actually very strange because all the settings for storage were configured correctly.

So to understand what exactly is happening here, we collected the VMM tracing while trying to reproduce the issue as per the Article below:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2913445/en-us 

 

And after we analysed the VMM trace we saw the below message appearing there under the Function SANMigrationBetweenHAandNonHAHostPrecheck.RunPrecheck:

 

DeployLUNNotFoundUsingStorageProvider (26207)

And also we saw the Below Pathsbeing referenced there:

[Microsoft-VirtualMachineManager-Debug]4,4,SANStorageManagementHelper.cs,1342,filePath C:\Windows\system32\vmguest.iso accessPath [\\?\Volume{21fd0518-ea71-11e4-80cb-bc305bee5327}\](file://\\?\Volume%7B21fd0518-ea71-11e4-80cb-bc305bee5327%7D\)

 

So as you can see in the above path, it is trying to access VMGuest.ISO somehow for this VM which is Ofcourse not SAN Capable or on a SAN storage. SO went back and checked the VM settings in VMM to see if that ISO is Mounted on that VM. But to our surprise that VM did not have any ISO mounted.

 

Our further investigation revealed that the VM had a few Check Points configured and those Check Points had this VMGuest.ISO mounted there as shown below:

 

image

 

 

So we deleted those CheckPoints from the VM configuration in VMM and after that when we tried to migrate, we now saw the “SAN” option showing up there as “Transfer Type”.

 

As you can see that even if at the surface everything looks fine you can still have some issues in the configuration deep inside causing Problems like this.

Will catch you later in my upcoming Posts…Happy Reading.

 

Author:

Nitin Singh

Support Escalation Engineer

Microsoft Security and Manageability Division