Vmware and Compressed drives - WriteFileEx failed error 33

[mbalsam]

I've been using startwind and vmware vcenter 4 successfully for the last month. I now want to backup the iscsi drive images and realized that its going to be difficult to copy a single 300G drive image.

So, i created a compressed drive thinking that the actual storage space would be much less to backup.

I have the compressed and non-compressed iscsi drives accessible to the ESX 4.0 server and did a vmware Migrate. This is when the problems started.

In the starwind log files i see

7/24 12:11:18.546 300 IMG: *** ImageFile_ReadWriteSectors: WriteFileEx(0x02210000, 1024, 0x963b53e00) failed (33).

If (33) is a windows error then this means

ERROR_LOCK_VIOLATION 33 (0x21) - The process cannot access the file because another process has locked a portion of the file

This is my config

localhost:3260
StarWind iSCSI Target v4.1 (Build 20090515, Win32)
Active license count: Unlimited
Machine ID: 444D3xxxx
License ID: 19xxx
License Type: FREE Edition
User name: Unknown
Organization: Unknown
Registered plugins: imagefile, virtualdvd, ramdisk

Windows reports that the iscsi file is 97.6G and 30.3G on disk.

I have one esx 4.0 server connecting to it.

It appears to be a size or sector related issue since i have 9vm's on the drive but cant add a 10'th. I can migrate vms off but cant go past beyond this "locked portion of the file" (if that is the problem).

Thanks in advance for any guidance you can offer!

[Robert (staff)]

Hello mbalsam,

Please clarify whether you were able to perform a complet migration to a compressed storage, or was the process interrupted somewhere in the middle?

If you have complete the migration, would it be possible to temporarily disconnect the compressed target and then re-connect it to your ESX?

Thanks

[mbalsam]

I migrated several VM's successfully. Then i got to a point where it would not accept any more VM's. From then on any migration would end in an ESX failure.

I was able to migrate all of the VM's back to a non-compressed drive and kept working.

So, at this point I dont have a way of testing anymore. But if you think this should work, i can attempt to set it up again.

I do know that the entire ESX server and the storage server were restarted before the problems started and then a day after the problems were encountered again. Which would indicate that the locked sectors persisted between reboots..

[Robert (staff)]

We will try to reproduce this in our testing lab and let you know about the results.

Thanks