Failure during VMotion may lead to unresponsive or powered off virtual machines

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• VM may become unresponsive or forcefully powered off during migration if a failure occurs
• This may result in the vCenter migration task not making progress

Cause

• Insufficient network bandwidth for VM configuration
• Incompatible ESXi host/guest driver versions
• GPU hardware failure, e.g. Xid reported on source or destination

Resolution

1. Confirm the source and destination ESXi host/guest driver versions are compatible with the GPU used and it is supported (if applicable).
2. To unblock the vCenter tasks restart the vCenter Server.
3. If the VM is powered-off, attempt to power-on the VM. Since the migration failed and left the VM in a powered-off state, you may need the following KB to resolve .vmdk lock issues:

        Powering on a virtual machine fails with the error: Cannot open the disk
        Investigating virtual machine file locks on ESXi hosts     

     4. In some cases a VM process  will still be holding the lock, for which the VM should be shutdown holding the lock using the methods described here on both HostA and HostB using ESXi Shell. Refer to KB - Powering off an unresponsive virtual machine on an ESXi host
     5. Attempt to power-on the VM again.

 

     

 

Additional Information

For insufficient network bandwidth for VM configuration refer to KB - vMotion or Storage vMotion of a VM fails with the error: The migration has exceeded the maximum switchover time of 100 second(s)