Failure to decrypt VM or disk

You want to be upgrading your vCenter to 7.0u3o anyway because of VMSA-2023-0023.

However, you may also want to upgrade to this version if you are using vSphere encryption. I have found that some earlier versions of vCenter 7.0u3 may at times fail to decrypt VMs or decrypt disks. This seems to occur when moving a VM from one host to another, when starting a stopped VM, and when creating a snapshot. I’m not sure what the cause of this error is; in our case it seemed to happen for recently rekeyed VMs, and I hypothesize that it occurred in cases where the rekey succeeded but where it took the key provider a long time to generate the key.

Initially we were able to recover from this state by attempting to motion VMs to alternate hosts until successful. However, VMware support recommended we upgrade to 7.0u3o, and we haven’t seen the problem since then. There is a relevant release note in 7.0u3o referring to a failure to “apply an encryption storage policy to a virtual machine,” and I believe this is related to the issue we saw.

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