vMotion fails after decomissioning vCloud Director or moving a VM out of the vCD environment

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

If you have decommissioned vCloud Director or you have migrated a vCloud Director managed VM outside of the vCloud Director environment, you see the error:

 

"A general system error occurred: the virtual machine vcd/system.service.vmware.vsla.vcd service, which is not available on the host" when trying to vMotion a VM

Cause

This issue occurs because virtual machines that were once managed by vCloud Director will fail a vMotion compatibility check to a host that is not currently prepared and / or enabled in vCloud Director.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, use one of these options:

 

• Unregister affected VM(s) from the vCenter Server.
• Browse the datastore to find the VM folders and .vmx files and then re-import/register the VM into vCenter Server.