Cannot start a virtual machine after trying to export this VM as OVF/OVA

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Cannot start a virtual machine with an error "The attempted operation cannot be performed in the current state (Powered off)."
• You tried to export this VM as OVF/OVA before trying to power-on.
• In hostd.log, you can see similar to

2023-04-24T13:34:31.078Z error hostd[1052495] [Originator@6876 sub=Vmsvc.vm:/vmfs/volumes/618a42f5-8697dbb8-57af-00505601015e/TEST-VM/TEST-VM.vmx opID=lgupz55x-491-auto-do-h5:70000157-67-01-01-01-01-d8-a5da user=vpxuser] Invalid transition requested (VM_STATE_EXPORTING -> VM_STATE_POWERING_ON): Invalid state

 

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0

Cause

This issue is caused by deadlock in exporting OVA.

As a result, ESXi host agent does not change the state of this virtual machine from VM_STATE_EXPORTING to the original state.

Resolution

This is a known issue affecting ESXi 7.0 or later and older than 7.0 U3q.
This issue was fixed in VMware ESXi 8.0 Update 2 and VMware ESXi 7.0 Update 3q.

Workaround:

This issue can be resolved by restarting ESXi host daemon.

# /etc/init.d/hostd restart

Additional Information

Restarting the Management agents in ESXi