Virtual Machine File System I/O operations time out

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

A storage or network problem interrupts access to the VMware VMFS volume. The VMFS heartbeat cannot connect to the volume and times out. Other hosts accessing the same VMFS volume might break on-disk locks held by this host.

Example

A VMFS datastore, datastore-1, resides on a SAN LUN. HostA connects to the SAN through a Fibre Channel when an outage occurs on the Fibre Channel switch port that HostA is connected to. HostA can no longer access the LUN. Individual VMFS heartbeat I/Os against datastore-1 time out. The host's lease on the volume expires after 16 seconds. At this point the heartbeat is declared to be timed out, and the administrator receives this event.

Impact

Virtual machine I/O against the datastore times out. Virtual machine power operations for VMs residing on the datastore will time out or fail.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 6.5.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5

Resolution

Resolve the network or storage issue.