Concurrent virtual machine migrations using XvMotion fail with the error: A General System Error occurred
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Concurrent virtual machine migrations using XvMotion fail with the error: A General System Error occurred

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Article ID: 342767

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Updated On:

Products

VMware vCenter Server VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

  • Concurrent virtual machine migrations using XvMotion fails.
  • XvMotion virtual machine migrations fail.
  • You see the error:

    A General System Error occurred

  • In the vmware.log file of the virtual machine, you see entries similar to:
2012-02-01T00:50:59.206Z| Worker#0| W110: SVMotionRemoteDiskCreate: Remote disk create failed: 1
2012-02-01T00:50:59.206Z| Worker#0| W110: SVMotion: scsi0:0: Failed to create disk from /vmfs/volumes/########-####-########2422/XvmLinkedClone/host.example.com/vm/vm.vmdk to /vmfs/volumes/########-####-########2506/vm/vm.vmdk.
2012-02-01T00:50:59.206Z| Worker#0| W110: SVMotionMirroredModeThread: Failed to create destination disks
2012-02-01T00:50:59.206Z| Worker#0| I120: Msg_Post: Error
2012-02-01T00:50:59.206Z| Worker#0| I120: [msg.svmotion.disk.createphase.fail] Failed to create one or more destination disks. Canceling Storage vMotion.

Note: The preceding log excerpts are only examples. Date, time, and environmental variables may vary depending on your environment.



Environment

VMware vCenter Server 5.5.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
VMware vCenter Server 5.1.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5

Cause

This issue occurs if the destination datastore is out of space.

Free space is calculated by vCenter Server based on each virtual machine. When launching multiple XvMotions tasks simultaneously, it appears that there is sufficient space for each virtual machine because virtual machines can see all the available space on the datastore. As each virtual machine in the batch gets successfully migrated to the destination using XvMotion, the later virtual machines fails with an out of space condition.

Resolution

This is a known issue affecting VMware ESXi and VMware vCenter Server 5.1/5.5.

To work around this issue, retry the XvMotion operation to a different datastore that has sufficient space available for the remaining virtual machines.

Note: If you are planning many migrations using XvMotion, you can avoid this issue by considering the space required to relocate each virtual machine and calculate the space required on the destination datastore(s) manually.


Additional Information