Invalid virtual machine configuration. Object policy is not compatible with datastore space efficiency policy configured on the cluster
Today I have configured a 2 node vSAN Streched Cluster with a customer in their existing vSphere environment. For this we created our own cluster, integrated the hosts accordingly into the existing virtual distributed switches and configured HA & DRS. Then it was about the vSAN configuration, for this the customer has 2 disk groups per host with 1x 1.6TB cache and 3x 3.84TB capacity devices.
As already mentioned above, the whole thing is to be deployed as a Streched Cluster (not ROBO 2-Node Deployment). For this we have created a vSAN storage policy with the following specs:
Site disaster tolerance: Site mirroring – streched cluster
Failures to tolerate: No data redundancy (other options not possible due to the number of components)
Encryption services: No preference
Space efficiency: Compression only
Storage Tier: All flash
Number of disk stripes per object: 1
Object space reservation: Thin provisioning
We applied this vSAN Storage Policy to the new 2 Node Streched Cluster and as soon as we tried to migrate a VM from the existing cluster to the new one or even create a new VM, we got the error message mentioned in the headline of this blog post.
After a little research in VMware’s Knowledge Base articles we found out that the Space Efficiency settings “Compression only” and “Compression and Deduplication” are not supported. This is relevant for Streched and Robo 2 Node Clusters, because the Witness Appliance always has a Space Efficiency setting of “none”.
The solution according to the Knowledge Base article is to update the environment to vSphere 8. For this I will ask the experts at VMware Explore 2023 in Barcelona if I can select and use one of the two Space Efficiencies in the Storage Policy with vSphere 8 accordingly.
The mentioned KB article: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/89201
That’s it from this blog post, I hope with this post you avoid such mistakes with your storage policy configurations.