App Volumes employs a default protection mechanism to prevent accidental deletion of attached VMDK volumes.

You can override this default protection by setting the CV_NO_PROTECT environment variable to 1.

Caution: With the CV_NO_PROTECT=1 setting, there is no protection in place for volumes and might result in the loss of a user's Writable Volumes.

If you delete a VM, vSphere deletes any writable disks that are attached.

Note: Do not use the CV_NO_PROTECT variable when App Volumes is configured to use Writable Volumes.

Configuring the AVM_PROTECT_VOLUMES Variable

The AVM_PROTECT_VOLUMES environment variable provides increased volume protection and logon performance by using the updated vSphere functionality. Setting AVM_PROTECT_VOLUMES=1 enables support for vMotion and increases VMDK attachment performance.

Note: Storage vMotion is not supported.

You can use AVM_PROTECT_VOLUMES only with the following versions of vSphere:

  • 6.0 Update 1a (or newer)
  • 5.5 Update 3b (or newer)
Note: If you set AVM_PROTECT_VOLUMES=1 on unsupported versions of ESX/ESXi on all hypervisors running App Volumes, it results in protection failures.