Diagnostics for VMware Cloud Foundation: vMotion Dashboard

Products

VCF Operations

Issue/Introduction

VMware Cloud Foundation Operations provides information on vmotions that succeed or fail, and a troubleshooting workflow for some failure cases. This KB helps you troubleshoot problems with this feature itself and vmotion problems.

The vMotion Dashboard presents the vMotions that have occurred in the last seven days. For successful vMotions, the Dashboard reports the pre-copy time, pre-copy bandwidth, and switchover time for each one. These values help you see how well your infrastructure is configured (screenshot) and provides insight into why a vMotion could take longer than expected. For example, an increase in the pre-copy time and switchover time compared to earlier vMotions of the same VM indicates a possible issue with your physical network and infrastructure: it might be a physical switch too busy or a NIC driver dropping packets. Or, it could be that the vMotion occurred while the VM was issuing many writes or the source/destination hosts were overloaded at the time.

For vmotion that failed, you see the type of failure, such as timeout, and an explanation of this failure type. For failure types that can result in a vmotion timing out, a troubleshooting flow is provided. This troubleshooting flow checks for configuration and runtime conditions that could cause vmotion to timeout. When run, the troubleshoot workflow evaluates both the source and destination host involved in the vMotion. KB https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/383461 describes these checks and actions to take to resolve any checks that report a problem. Other important vMotion health checks are implemented as findings. If the troubleshooting flow reports no issue, review the manual and auto refreshed vMotion findings for possible additional causes for vmotion failures.

Environment

Operations for VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0

Resolution

Problems with the VCF vMotion Dashboard

Problem: the vMotion summary charts are not reporting all vMotions that have occurred or the values reported are not consistent with the data reported in the vMotion detail table.

Resolution: the vMotion summary and vMotion detail information is collected by different components from the vCenters in your environment. Temporary inconsistencies can be due to non overlapping collection cycles. If you observe ongoing differences, check whether VCF Operations for Logs is collecting vCenter events from all the vCenters within the VCF Operation inventory. vCenter log and event collection can be enabled using the VCF Operations account page for each vCenter and configured using the Infrastructure Operations > Configure > Log Collection tile.

Problem: The vMotion Dashboard table does not list any vMotions, vMotions are missing from the table, or vMotions are listed in the table but, for the successful ones, the time/bandwidth statistics are not provided.

Resolution: this feature requires VCF Operations for Logs to collect events and vCenter logs from your vCenters. Verify that vCenter is configured to forward its logs to VCF Operations for Logs. vCenter log and event collection can be enabled using the VCF Operations account page for each vCenter and configured using the Infrastructure Operations > Configure > Log Collection tile. In addition, a vMotion will only be shown in the table if the vCenter used to perform the vMotion is one that VCF Operations is monitoring and that monitoring is active (i.e., not stopped). If you suspect this dependency as a possible cause, verify that there is a vCenter account for the given vCenter and that monitoring is enabled.

Problem: The button to initiate the vMotion troubleshooting flow is missing from some of the vMotion failure drill-down pages.

Resolution: By design, the button is only shown for a subset of the errors that cause vMotion to fail. The troubleshoot flow checks for conditions that cause timeouts. There is no point in running the flow for unrelated errors.

Problem: The troubleshooting workflow reported one or more check failures. How do I correct the problem reported by the check failure?

Resolute: See KB https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article/383461

Problems with vMotion of Virtual Machines

For troubleshooting and known issues related to vMotion please refer to the following KBs.

Specific Issues Causing Vmotion to fail with a time out error