Today my vCenter task bar started filling up with errors from VMware View’s daily maintenance, complaining that it couldn’t wipe a Flex-SE virtual disk:
Wipe a Flex-SE virtual disk vmPC-019 A general system error occurred:
Wipe Disk failed: Failed to complete wipe operation.The Cause: Changed Block Tracking
It turned out that our vRanger backup solution had enabled Changed Block Tracking (CBT) on these virtual machines, and View’s Flex-SE disk wipe doesn’t work with CBT turned on.
The Fix
Right-click each View desktop VM and disable Changed Block Tracking. Once CBT is off, the wipe errors stop.
This VMware Knowledge Base article helped me work out what was going on: VMware KB 2039907 (archived copy).