The Question Dialog box automatically times out after 4 minutes if left unanswered while powering on a VM.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• When powering on a virtual machine, a message is displayed which requires the user to answer by selecting one of the choices and clicking OK
  
  For example, if virtual machine files are manually moved to a different location, you see the message:
  
  This virtual machine might have been moved or copied.
  
  This Virtual Machine Message is dismissed automatically if unanswered within 4 minutes.

• In the /vmfs/volumes/datastore_name/virtual_machine_folder/vmware.log, you see messages similar to:

<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time>.345Z| vmx| I120: Msg_Question:
</time><YYYY-MM-DD>T<time></time>.345Z| vmx| I120: [msg.uuid.altered] This virtual machine might have been moved or copied.
<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time></time>.Z| vmx| I120+ In order to configure certain management and networking features, VMware ESX needs to know if this virtual machine was moved or copied.
<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time></time>.Z| vmx| I120+
<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time></time>.Z| vmx| I120+ If you don't know, answer "I Co_pied It".
<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time></time>.Z| vmx| I120:
<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time></time>.Z| vmx| I120: ----------------------------------------
<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time></time>.Z| vmx| I120: Timing out dialog 17344263
<YYYY-MM-DD>T<time></time>.Z| vmx| I120: Vigor_MessageRevoke: message 'msg.uuid.altered' (seq 17344263) is revoked

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi

Cause

This issue occurs because, starting with ESXi 6.x, a four-minute timeout for all virtual machine messages is enabled by default.

Resolution

There is no option to disable timeout for the question individually. The timeout period can be increased to a higher value to prevent timeouts. This results in the same behavior of waiting for the question to be answered as in previous versions.

To increase the timeout, add this parameter/value to the virtual machine configuration file:

vui.timeoutUS.question = “9223372036854775807”

 

For more information on editing virtual machine configuration file , see Tips for editing a .vmx file