We ran into an interesting issue last week.  While trying to migrate some VMs onto a replicated datastore for SRM, we got this interesting error:

File [source-datastore]path/to.vmdk is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore ‘target-datastore

file-larger-max-size-datastore

It’s strange because this is a 5.5 vCenter, 5.1 hosts, both datastores are vmfs5 and the vmdks were 60GB & 80GB. From what I could tell, everything was identical. Further testing revealed I could storage vMotion from the SRM datastore to regular datastores, but I could not move anything onto the SRM datastore.

After googling, I found the standard VMware response of ‘select a different datastore’, and further research didn’t show much else beyond the differences of the vmfs versions, and differences between vmfs5 among 5.0, 5.1, and 5.5. That’s nice and all, but none of these applied to me.

Restarted vCenter services on a whim, and guess what? It worked! LOL! Sometimes the strangest of issues can be fixed by the simplest of things.