VMotion Might Fail on ESX Server 2.5.4 Patch 2 and Higher when Virtual Machines Have Virtual Floppy or CDROM Devices Pointing to Incorrectly Specified Image Files

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

After applying patch 2 or higher on ESX Server 2.5.4, VMotion might fail with the following error message:

"Failed to start virtual machine copy server. Reason: Failed to update the temporary config file '/tmp/######/my_vm.vmx"

You will also see the following errors in the ESX Server hostd log files:

failed to open (1049095): AIOMgr_Open failed..

Failed to open vmfs disk.

failed to open (1049095). Descriptor file couldn't be read

failed to open (1049095).

failed to open with flags 23

This has been observed in the following scenarios:

• The virtual machine being VMotioned has a floppy device that points to a floppy image file and the fileName property points to a file that does not have the .flp extension. Here is an example of how the VMX file of the virtual machine would look like:

floppy0.fileType = "file"

floppy0.fileName = "/vmimages/cpuid.img"

• The virtual machine being VMotioned has a CDROM device that points to a CDROM image file and the fileName property points to a file that does not have the .iso extension. Here is an example of how the VMX file of the virtual machine would look like:

ide1:0.deviceType = "cdrom-image"

ide1:0.fileName = "/vmimages/windows2003.nrg"

Environment

VMware VirtualCenter 1.4.x
VMware ESX Server 2.5.x

Resolution

To work around this problem, make sure that floppy devices pointing to image files have the .flp extension in the floppy image filename and that CDROM devices pointing to CDROM image files have the .iso extension in the image filename.