After cold migration of a virtual machine, base virtual disks with snapshots have a CID mismatch

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

If a virtual machine has a snapshot, cold-migrating it with VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 from one VMware ESX 3.5 Server to another changes the Content ID (CID) of the parent virtual disk. The change causes a boot failure with the error message: A general system error occurred: Internal error.

The vmware.log file for the virtual machine contains the message: The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created.

Environment

VMware ESX Server 3.5.x
VMware VirtualCenter 2.5.x

Resolution

This issue is caused by a VMware ESX software issue.

To resolve this issue and allow the virtual machine to power on again, see Resolving "The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created" CID mismatch errors (1007969).

This issue is resolved in VMware ESX 3.5 Update 2 and later. For additional information, see VMware ESX 3.5, Patch ESX350-200904401-BG: Updates vmkernel vmx hostd etc (1010126).