The requested operation will exceed the VDC’s storage quota

vSphere 5.1 introduced a number of vCloud Director (vCD) interoperability features from a storage perspective, namely ability to take VM snapshots from within the vCD UI, interoperability with Storage Profiles and interoperability with Storage DRS. Admittedly, its been a while since I played with vCD and I am a little rusty, but I wanted to see how well these storage features worked with vCD 5.1. I’ll follow-up with some future posts on how this all integrates, but this first post is just to highlight an issue I ran into in my haste to get the environment up and running.

The Storage DRS and associated datastore cluster, along with Storage Profiles all showed up just fine when building my Provider VDC. These must be created in vSphere in advance however – they cannot be setup from vCD. I then rolled out my ORG VDC and uploaded a virtual machine from my vSphere environment to use in my vApp. The vApp deployed just fine on the datastore cluster – so far, so good. To continue my Storage DRS & Storage Profile testing, I decided to put this vApp into a catalog so that other ORGs could use it. That when I hit this error.

The requested operation will exceed the VDC's storage quota

Now, vCD aficionados will probably recognize this immediately, but this error threw me initially. I thought first that maybe my datastore cluster didn’t have enough space for the vApp & catalog entry. So I checked my datastore cluster & it had plenty of space:

Datastore Cluster

I then went back to check if there was some sort of limit on my storage allocation. And yes, there was. I found it in the ORG-VDC Administration section in the Storage Profiles tab (click on the screen-shot to enlarge it if it is difficult to read):

Storage Profiles in vCloud Director

In my haste to roll out my environment, I guess I missed the point where a storage limit is set. A quick edit of the Storage Profile associated with the ORG-VDC let me change the Storage Limit on the fly – I bumped it up to 120GB:

ORGVDC Storage Profile Limit

This now allowed me to successfully add the imported vApp to my catalog for sharing with other ORGs.

VMware has a detailed whitepaper highlighting the new vCD 5.1 features if you’d like to check it out.

6 Replies to “The requested operation will exceed the VDC’s storage quota”

  1. I am having a hard time wrapping my head around this. So, we created two profiles Gold and Silver with over 500GB available on each. The came into vCloud with no issue.

    I then created a vdc and added both profiles but limited the Gold to a 100GB and the Silver to 200GB. It was all downhill from there. Keep in mind the underlying datasore has 500GB for each profile and for simplicity we only had 1 datastore backing each profile for our test.

    I created a 80GB VM on the Silver. This left us with 120GB in Silver and 100GB in Gold.

    I then created a 80GB VM in Gold. This left us 120GB in Silver and 20GB in Gold.

    I figured we should be able to create another 80GB VM in Silver. When I attempted to do that it told us the VDC has reached its quota. Same message as you got above. How come? Silver still has 120GB left. After messing around with all settings, I figured maybe its treating the higher limit between the two as the limit for the entire VDC (pure speculation). So I increased the limit on Silver from 200 to 240GB. Why 240GB? I figured that may allow three VMs 80GB+80GB+80GB.

    Sure enough after this I was able to deploy the third 80GB VM.

    I just cant undertand how the limits and on storage profiles are handled for VDC. What am I missing here?

    1. Could it be a shadow-VM that is consuming the additional space? If you are using linked-clones (Fast Provisioned), and you are deploying a vApp to a datastore that does not contain the original base-disk, a shadow-VM copy of the base disk has to be copied to the destination datastore. Could that account for the need for additional space and the reason why you cannot deploy more vApps without it?

      1. Hi,
        Thanks for the feedback. Sorry I forgot to mention both fast and thin provisioning are disabled. Interestingly if one vdc hits the limit within the same org that effects all vdc. And obviously it’s not hitting the limit. The datastore at the vsphere level also doesn’t show anything other than what’s provisioned.

        I created a new org and a vdc with same limits there and it behaved like it should. I then created a third org and that had the same issues I described above. Really odd.

        I do want to point out that I am using the appliance as I am really evaluating the features and such. The appliance wouldn’t be the cause of the inconsistency right?

        1. I’m not sure Bilal. My recommendation would be to talk to one of our GSS folks about it. As I said in the original post, I’m not that well versed in the inner workings of vCD.

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