vMotion fail with error: Migration failed after VM memory precopy

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

A vMotion of the virtual machine: WEBSERVERXX failed with the following:
Disconnected from virtual machine. yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss.219341Z Migration failed after VM memory precopy. Please check vmkernel log for true error. yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss.955124Z Remote connection failure Failed to establish transport connection. Cannot open file "/vmfs/volumes/xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxx-e43d1ae8b550/WEBSERVERXX/WEBSERVERXX.vmx": 16 (Device or resource busy). Unable to load configuration file '/vmfs/volumes/xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxx-e43d1ae8b550/WEBSERVERXX/WEBSERVERXX.vmx'
    
From the vmware.log, we could see the following:
    yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss.271Z In(05) vmx - E1000: Failed to init MAC backend
    yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss.271Z In(05) vmx - E1000: Failed to init function 0.
    yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ssZ[+0.000] Wa(03) vmx - Caught signal 11 -- tid 18938653 (addr 10)
    
From the VM configuration we can see that the MAC address is manually assigned.

Environment

vSphere 7.0.x

Cause

The MAC address on the VM was manually assigned. These setting were assigned to the VM when they have performed a migration of the customer infrastructure to a hosted infrastructure. On the destination infrastructure VMware vCloud Director is in use.
The manually assigned MAC address caused the vMotion to fail.

Resolution

To rectify the issue:

1. Power down the virtual machine
2. Edit the network adapter and set the MAC address assignment to automatic.
3. Power on the virtual machine
4. Perform the vMotion.