Compute vMotion failing with switchover error and the VM fails to resume on the source ESXi host

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Host-Local Swap has been enabled on the ESXi hosts as per Using Swap Files with vSphere
• Compute vMotion fails with a switchover error in the GUI: The migration has exceeded the maximum switchover time of 135 second(s).
• The virtual machine becomes unresponsive, cannot be pinged or accessed using RDP/SSH or via console and cannot be powered on/off.
• The nvram file of the VM is locked by the destination ESXi host with the below log messages in the vmware.log of the VM on the source ESXi host:
  
  2024-06-24T12:38:10.222Z In(05) vmx - Migrate: Attempting to continue running on the source.
2024-06-24T12:38:14.231Z In(05) vmx - OBJLIB-FILEBE : FileBEOpen: can't open '<VM_NAME>.nvram' : Failed to lock the file (262146).
2024-06-24T12:38:14.231Z In(05) vmx - NVRAMMGR:  NvmanReopen: Failed to reopen NVRAM: Failed to lock the file
2024-06-24T12:38:14.231Z Wa(03) vmx - MigrateResumeVM: Failed to reopen nvram file.

 

Environment

• ESXi 8.0 U1
• ESXi 8.0 U2

Resolution

This issue will be resolved in a future release of vSphere. 

Workaround:

• Remove the Host-Local Swap configuration and allow the swap file to be in it's default location