When attempting to vMotion virtual machines between ESXi hosts that have been recently migrated to a new vCenter Server and virtual distributed switch (VDS), the operation fails with timeout errors. The following error messages appear in the logs:
Migration to host <IP_ADDRESS> failed with error Timeout (195887137).
vMotion migration failed to receive data from the remote host: Timeout Failed waiting for data. Error 195887137.
vMotion migration failed to send buffer to remote host: Timeout.
vMotion migration failed writing stream completion: Timeout
These failures prevent successful migration of VMs between hosts in the same cluster, blocking normal operations such as host maintenance and upgrades.
The root cause is corruption or incomplete migration of VMkernel (vmk) interface configurations used for vMotion traffic. When ESXi hosts are moved from one vCenter Server to another, especially when moving from an NSX environment to a non-NSX environment, the VMkernel interface data in the vCenter database may not migrate correctly. This creates a situation where:
The database corruption affects how the hosts communicate for vMotion traffic, even though standard management traffic works correctly.
To resolve this issue, recreate the vMotion VMkernel interfaces on the affected hosts: