Remediation of ESXi hosts using Update Manager fails due to timeout while entering Host into Maintenance Mode

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

To increase evacuation timeout set in Update Manager, that prevents ESXi host from entering maintenance mode

Symptoms:
vMotion of all VMs off of the Host takes longer than 30 minutes
Host fails to enter maintenance mode due to timeout

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 6.0.x
VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.0.x

Cause

Update Manager has a default timeout of 30 minutes. If migrating all of the VMs from the host takes longer than 30 minutes due to slow network / low bandwidth, enter maintenance mode task times out.

Resolution

This issue is resolved in VMware vCenter Server 6.0 Update3c.

Workaround:
Increase time out value for VM evacuation in Update Manager config file:

Take a backup of the file /usr/lib/vmware-updatemgr/bin/vci-integrity.xml :
cd /
mkdir /backup
cp /usr/lib/vmware-updatemgr/bin/vci-integrity.xml /backup/

Edit the vci-integrity.xml file with an editor (example : vi) to increase the timeout value from 1800 seconds to 7200 seconds (or however long would be sufficient to move all the VMs from the host)

vi  /usr/lib/vmware-updatemgr/bin/vci-integrity.xml

<VMEvacuationTimeout>1800</VMEvacuationTimeout>

Change it to:

<VMEvacuationTimeout>7200</VMEvacuationTimeout>

Restart the Update Manager service:

service-control --stop vmware-updatemgr
service-control --start vmware-updatemgr