Virtual machine becomes orphaned and reports a Not protected status when trying to enable Fault tolerance

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• If you try to enable Fault Tolerance on a virtual machine, it goes into an orphaned state in vCenter Server
• If you try to enable Fault Tolerance on a virtual machine, its Summary tab displays the message:
  
  Fault Tolerance Status: Not protected (Need Secondary VM)
  
  
• The Start Fault Tolerance Secondary VM task stalls for 10 minutes at 54%, then returns with a completed status
• After several minutes, the virtual machine is no longer orphaned and shows registered to the FT secondary host, but the Fault Tolerance Status is Not Protected
• The Virtual Machine bounces between the primary and secondary host every few minutes
• The secondary virtual machine's log file (vmware-Virtual Machine Name_1.log) contains the entries:
  
  Mar 22 08:11:59.647: vmx| Gone live because of Lost connection to primary.
  Mar 22 08:11:59.651: vmx| Unstunning after golive

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 4.0.x

Resolution

This issue occurs if the checkpoint.cptConfigName = "Virtual Machine Name" parameter exists inside the virtual machine's .vmx file. This parameter may exist if a third party application added it to the .vmx file.

To resolve this issue, turn off Fault Tolerance and remove the checkpoint.cptConfigName parameter.

To turn off Fault Tolerance:

1. Right-click on the virtual machine and click Fault Tolerance
2. Select Turn Off Fault Tolerance.

Note: If the option to turn off Fault Tolerance is disabled (that is, greyed out), repeat steps 1 and 2 until the option is enabled (that is, no longer greyed out). The option may be disabled due to the frequently changing error state of Fault Tolerance on the affected virtual machine.

To remove the checkpoint.cptConfigName parameter:

Note: Removing this parameter may affect the third party application that added it to the .vmx file.

1. Power off the affected virtual machine.
2. Unregister the virtual machine from the vCenter Inventory. Right-click the virtual machine and choose Remove from Inventory.
3. Log into the ESX service console as root.
4. Change to the path where the .vmx file resides using the command:
   
   cd /vmfs/volumes/Datastore/VM
   
   
5. Open the .vmx file in a text editor and delete the line:
   
   checkpoint.cptConfigName = "Virtual Machine Name"
   
   Note: For more information, see Editing files on an ESX host using vi or nano (1020302).
   
6. Save and close the file.
7. Open the datastore browser and browse to the directory where the .vmx file is located.
8. Right-click on the .vmx file and choose Add to Inventory.

Additional Information

Note: The setting ctkDisallowed="true" does not affect the checkpoint.cptConfigName parameter. For more information about the setting ctkDisallowed="true", see Fault Tolerant virtual machines rapidly switch between ESX hosts when being powered on (1013400).