A VM Powers Off unexpectedly after failing to Resume.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Operations such a taking or removing Snapshots, resizing a Virtual Disk or performing a vMotion all require that the virtual machine be suspended and resumed.

The VM will "freeze" for a moment while the change is happening.

Very rarely an issue can occur which prevents the VM from Resuming after this "freeze".

The following error appears in the hostd log on ESXi:

Log location on ESXi: /var/log/run/hostd.log 

"An operation required the virtual machine to quiesce and the virtual machine was unable to continue running."

Environment

These issues impact all version of ESXi.

Resolution

Some specific issue has occurred which has prevented the virtual machine from resuming, and so it has been powered off.

Potential causes of these issues include, but are not limited to:

• Could not lock the files of the VM. (Another process has the lock.)
  • Investigating virtual machine file locks on ESXi hosts
  • Virtual Machine shuts down after a disk consolidation due to a locked file
• Could not open the files of the VM. (Storage inaccessible)
  • Permanent Device Loss (PDL) and All-Paths-Down (APD) in vSphere ESXI
• Could not read files of the VM. (File corruption.)

Please open a case with VMware by Broadcom support to investigate the specific issue. Include the timestamp of the issue, the virtual machine log files for the affected VM (included with the the ESXi log bundle for the host where the VM is currently registered) and the ESXi log bundle for the host where the issue occurred. In the case of a vMotion, the ESXi log bundles of both source and destination hosts are required.