VM inaccessible during disk consolidation due to ONTAP LUN write protection
Applies to
- NetApp ONTAP 9
- FAS/AFF
- VMware ESXi (iSCSI protocol)
Issue
- During a disk consolidation operation on a virtual machine (VM), the VM became inaccessible.
- The underlying storage device (LUN naa.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx), hosted on ONTAP volume Vol1 and presented via iSCSI protocol, was found to be in a persistent 'Write Protected' (read-only) state, preventing necessary metadata updates.
- Application services running on the affected VM were impacted due to the VM becoming inaccessible.
- Volume was configured with thick provisioning, Fractional Reserve is set to 100, and storage efficiency enabled
- VMware logs showed
SCSI errorsindicatingspace allocation failure:
2026-07-21T14:24:11.674Z In(182) vmkernel:cpu58:2098240) ScsiDeviceIO:4686:Cmd(0x45da500c4400)0x93,CmdSN0x4f141774 from world128881238 to dev "naa.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" failed H:0x0D:0x2 P:0x8 Valid sense data: 0x7 0x27 0x7SenseKey 0x7 DATAPROTECTASC/ASCQ 0x27/0x7 Space Allocation Failed – Write Protected- ONTAP volume was reporting 100% utilization and insufficient space alerts:
[?] FriJun1900:33:47+0530 [xxxxxxxxxxxxxx-01:wafl_exempt03:wafl.vol.full:alert]: Insufficient space on volume Vol1@vserver:85a04742-f901-11ef-9907-d039eac6d8fb to perform operation. 72.0KB was requested but only 1.00KB was available.[?] FriJun1901:00:00+0530 [xxxxxxxxxxxx-01:dense_worker:sis.op.aborted:error]: SIS operation for /vol/Vol1@vserver:85a04742-f901-11ef-9907-d039eac6d8fb has aborted: Not enough disk space for the operation