Either Hot-Add backup or Hot-Add replication can fail with a 3201 error. The virtual appliance is on a VMFS 3 datastore and the failing VM is located on a VMFS 5 datastore.
Although the rest of this article will refer to Virtual Appliances, it applies equally to VAs and to the vRanger server itself it you are attempting Hot-Add to the vRanger server.
This is a variation on the problem when the Virtual Appliance is on a VMFS 3 datastore formatted with a smaller block size than the datastore containing the target VM. The datastore containing the VA must be compatible with the largest disk on the target VM. With VMFS 3, we want the datastore block size of the VA's datastore to be as large or larger than the datastore block size of the VM's datastore.
When VMFS5 is involved, the 1 MB block size of VMFS 5 can hold up to a 2 TB disk. We cannot mount a large disk to a VA on 1 MB VMFS3 datastore as the maximum file size of a 1 MB VMFS 3 datastore is 256 GB.
