All ESXi hosts are not showing within a cluster when attempting to vMotion a virtual machine

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• When attempting to vMotion a virtual machine within a cluster not all hosts will show within the Select a compute resource:
• When attempting to migrate VMs, the migration only sees one ESXi host, the ESXi host on which the VM is currently on. 

• Selecting Change both compute resource and storage, will display all hosts in the cluster within the Select compute resource.

• This occurs on the vSphere Client (HTML 5) and vSphere Web client.

 

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.x

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.x

Cause

This is expected behavior as destination ESXi host do not have an access to the source ESXi datastore(s).

 

Resolution

To work around the issue;

• In the migration page select "Change both compute resource and storage"  
• Ensure there is no Affinity Rule configured for the Virtual machine.  Using Affinity Rules with vSphere DRS
• Ensure all ESXi hosts in the cluster are able to access the datastore(s) where the VM files are residing.

 

Additional Information

Types of Migration