As we are attempting to power on a VM, the operation fails with the following error – Object type requires hosted I/O error.
The cause of this error is a dirty shutdown of the VM that may have happened/ backup snapshots left behind and will need you to repair the VMDK file or the file may be locked by a process that will need to be cleared to powerup the VM.
Power off the VM, log to the ESXI host via SSH and browse to the datastore folder holding the VMDK file. If the issue is caused by a locked file, follow this blog to clear the lock
If the touch command is successful, then there is a lock on the path so run the following command
vmkfstools -x check “gitlab.vmdk”
vmkfstools -x repair “gitlab.vmdk”
There could also be another possibility even with the above approach, you still won’t be able to powerup the VM so try this step which is just a clone of the vmdk and attach this vmdk to the VM to replace the old disk.
If the above operation fails or the VM comes as invalid, unregister the VM from the ESXi inventory and rescan all the datastores on the vCenter.
Register the VM to the ESXi host and rescan the datastores once again and this time our VM should be powered up successfully.
