Warning: "The virtual machine was restarted automatically by vSphere HA" due to NFS file locking

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

VMs were rebooted by HA process

The following was seen in the event description in vCenter:

"The virtual machine was restarted automatically by vSphere HA on this host. This response may be triggered by a failure of the host the virtual machine was originally running on or by an unclean power-off of the virtual machine (eg. if the vmx process was killed)."

Environment

NFS storage attached to cluster

Cause

Hostd.log

"Failed to open '/vmfs/volumes/#######/host#######/host#######-flat.vmdk' : Failed to lock the file (40003) (0x44003)."

Error 40003 NFS file locking during disk consolidation

Resolution

The issue is with file locks on the NFS storage. Check with NFS storage vendor

Additional Information

• Snapshot consolidation task fails with error "Unable to access file since it is locked An error occurred while consolidating disks: Failed to lock the file"
  
  
• Investigating Virtual Machine file locks on ESXi Host(s)