By Frank Denneman, Sr. Technical Marketing Architect
When using virtual machines that have disks set to snapshot independent and are placed in a datastore cluster, attempting to enter SDRS maintenance mode for a datastore results in the error "The virtual machine is pinned to a host."
By default Storage DRS will not move virtual machines with independent disks. Independent disks can be shared or not. To determine if the disks are shared is a very expensive operation within the algorithm, as Storage DRS needs to investigate every virtual machine and its disks in the datastore cluster. To reduce the overhead generated by Storage DRS on the virtual infrastructure, Storage DRS does not recommend such moves.
However after getting feedback about the use of non-shared independent disk in a datastore cluster from customers and the community forums, the engineering team released a vpxd.cfg option sdrs.disableSDRSonIndependentDisk. By default this option is not listed in the vpxd.cfg and is treated as true. When specified and set to false, Storage DRS will move independent disks and the error “The virtual machine is pinned to a host” will not appear. Remember that this option will automatically apply to all datastore clusters managed by that vCenter server!
Please note that this option should only be used with non-shared independent disks! Moving shared independent disks is not supported
