Virtual machine crash after storage vMotion

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• Virtual machine crash with below event:
  
  No operating system was found. If you have an operating system installation disc, you can insert the disc into the system's CD-ROM drive and restart the virtual machine.
  
  
• Prior to virtual machine crash, storage vMotion is performed on the virtual machine. The storage vMotion is successful as per vCenter Server event:
  
  Virtual machine <virtual machine name> was migrated from host <ESXi host>, <source datastore> in <cluster> to <ESXi host>, <destination datastore> in <cluster>
  
  
• No particular error observed in virtual machine vmware.log.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 8.x
VMware vCenter Server 7.x

Cause

There's another datastore in vCenter Server with the same naa id as either the source or destination datastore of storage vMotion. 

Naa id is generated by storage and stands for network addressing authority identifier. This identifier is supposed to be unique globally even across storage systems. 

vCenter Server would not prevent storage devices with the same naa id from being presented but this would lead to unintended side effects including virtual machine crash after storage vMotion to or from the storage device with duplicate naa id.

Resolution

Storage vendor needs to be engaged in this situation to address and get rid of the duplicate naa id from storage system.

Additional Information

For more information on datastore naa id, please refer to Identifying disks when working with VMware ESXi.

To identify duplicate naa id in vCenter Server, one could login to vCenter Server ssh:

1. Login to vCenter Server database:
   
   /opt/vmware/vpostgres/current/bin/psql -d VCDB -U postgres
   
   
2. The naa id for all storage devices in vCenter Server can be gathered with: 
   
   select * from vpxv_ds_lun_info;
   
   
3. Check if there's duplicate naa id for storage vMotion source or destination device