VMware Storage vMotion fails when the virtual machine is migrated after a suspended and resume state

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

When performing Storage vMotion of a virtual machine that has resumed after being in a suspended stated, you experience these symptoms:

• The Storage vMotion fast suspend resume operation fails
• You see this error in vCenter Server:
  
  Error while tracking VMotion progress (vim.fault.MigrationNotReady)
  
  
• You see this error in the vmware log located in the virtual machine folder:
  
  Migrate_SetFailure: Failed to initialize fast suspend/resume: source VM not ready for FSR.

Environment

VMware ESX 4.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 4.0.x

Resolution

If the Virtual Machine has memory paged out to migration swap file and checkpoint file besides the normal swap file, then Fast suspend resume will fail. Since memory swapped out to these files is temporary and a fairly infrequent occurrence ( heavy guest memory swapping is needed to trigger) we fail Fast suspend resume request when Virtual machine has memory swapped to those places. hence the error message "Failed to intiialize fast suspend/resume: source VM not ready for FSR"

To resolve this issue:

1. Wait for couple of minutes and retry the Storage vMotion operation.
2. Do not serialize Virtual Machine resume operation from suspended state immediately followed with Storage vMotion.