Fault Tolerance (FT) failover fails on the Virtual Machines with VM Namespace being enabled

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This issue can cause FT failover failure, as the result, Virtual Machine is actually not under the FT protection even though vCenter UI shows FT status as "Active".

Symptoms:

When Virtual Machine is configured with VM Namespace and "namespaceMgr.dbFile" is present in the Virtual Machine config file, Fault Tolerance (FT) failover cannot succeed in resuming FT Secondary Virtual Machine, below error messages show in vmware.log of FT Secondary Virtual Machine:

vmx - NamespaceMgrCheckpoint: No valid database found while restoring the namespace fields.
vmx - Msg_Question:
In(05) vmx - [msg.checkpoint.restoregroup.failed] An error occurred while restoring the virtual machine state from file "(null)".
vmx - [msg.checkpoint.resume.error] An error caused the resume operation to fail. Preserve the suspended state and correct the error, or discard the suspended state.

 

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x

Cause

This is caused by inter-operational issue between FT and VM Namespace DB, as FT is not capable of replicating VM Namespace data from FT Primary VM to FT Secondary VM, and there is a lack of prevention for FT turn-on or for VM Namespace operations when another has been enabled.

Resolution

VM Namespace DB and VM DataSets are not supported with Fault tolerance.

 

Refer: vSphere Features Not Supported with Fault Tolerance

To remove the existing configuration, please follow the below steps:

• Before turning on FT, the components/products that could possibly create or use VM Namespace need to be disabled on the VM, including SDMP, vgauthImport, Appdefense, NSX and Guest Customization for Instant Clone. 

• The "namespaceMgr.dbFile" config setting needs to be removed from VM config file.

Note:

Please disable the components that utilize the Namespace DB and then remove the corresponding entry from the VMX file. If this is not done, there is a high likelihood that these components may continue to communicate with the VM, recreate the Namespace DB, and potentially cause issues in the future.