Instant clone parents are incompatible with Live Patch.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• This article provides more details on options available to the users to resolve this compatibility issue.

Symptoms:

• Live Patch failed with the remediation detail containing errors similar to:
  "Fast suspend and resume (FSR) is incompatible for the following Virtual Machines: VM1. Reason: they are instant clone parents"

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0 Update 3

Cause

• Live Patching the vmx binary requires Fast suspend and resume (FSR) to be performed on running virtual machine (VM) instances, which is not compatible with a VM that is frozen as a parent for creating a certain type of instant clones.

Resolution

Currently there is no resolution.

Workaround:

• For instant clone parent VMs that are created by VMware Horizon, starting with Horizon 8, instant clones can be created without parent VMs. That is the default provisioning scheme from Horizon 2306 with one exception. Please refer to Instant Clone Desktop Pools regarding provisioning schemes and KB 81026 for how to switch the scheme. If possible, use the provisioning scheme "Instant clones without parent VM" so as to avoid creating instant clone parent VMs.
  
  When instant clone parent VMs are present in the cluster, in order to allow Live Patch to proceed, the parent VMs need to be disabled. To globally disable parent VMs in a vCenter:

  1. In Horizon Console, select Settings > Servers.
  2. Select the vCenter server from the list, click More and select Disable ParentVMs.

• To selectively disable parent VMs for individual clusters, please refer to KB 80369.
• For instant clone parents created via other means, manually power off those VMs before attempting Live Patch.