vMotion fails for virtual machines with svga security hardening enabled.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Compute only, storage only, and compute & storage vMotions fail at ~72% for a virtual machine.
• The virtual machine was recently configured with the svga.vgaOnly = "True" flag.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5

Cause

This issue appears when the virtual machine is not powered off and powered on after setting the svga.vgaOnly = "True" flag. The setting is part of the vSphere Security Configuration Guide.

Resolution

To implement the svga.vgaOnly = "True" setting, if the value addition/change was made while the VM was still running, a complete power off and power on of the VM must take place. A Guest OS restart or reboot is not sufficient. 

VMware is working to better detect and warn users of this issue prior to migrations in future releases of vSphere.

Workaround:

To workaround the issue to allow any vMotion to occur again, change the svga.vgaOnly = "True" setting to svga.vgaOnly = "False" in the VM's advanced setting configuration.

To accomplish this for multiple virtual machines, the following PowerCLI commands can be used. This will set ALL virtual machines in the vCenter inventory to svga.vgaOnly = "False".

1. List the VMs and their current settings:

Get-VM | Get-AdvancedSetting -Name "svga.vgaOnly" | Select Entity, Name, Value

2. Setting value to False

Get-VM | Get-AdvancedSetting -Name "svga.vgaOnly" |Set-AdvancedSetting -Value 'false'