Virtual Machine fails to boot after restore from Cohesity with vSphere Hardware Version 20 or later

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

When restoring a virtual machine (VM) from Cohesity backup in a VMware vSphere 8.0 U3 environment, the restored VM may be created with an incorrect motherboard layout.

Observed behavior includes:

• Restored VMs fail to boot when EFI boot is specified.
• Issue observed on VMs restored via Cohesity backup solution.
• Behavior is specific to VMs with hardware version 20 and above.
• VM comes up with:
  • All disks in offline state.
  • A new NIC (instead of the original).
  • A different disk order than the original configuration.

Environment

• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0 U3

Cause

Based on analysis of /var/run/log/hostd.log and /var/log/vmware/vpxd/vpxd.log logs:

• Cohesity triggered a “Create VM” operation (not a “Clone VM”), and since hostd cannot distinguish between the two, the correct configuration was not preserved as vCenter would during a clone.
• It appears that Cohesity is not specifying the old motherboard layout during the VM recreation process.
• This omission triggers the default behavior:
  • For hardware version 20 and above, when EFI boot is specified, the VM defaults to being created with an ACPI motherboard layout rather than the original configuration.
• As a result, the restored Virtual Machine may fail to boot or present incorrect hardware/device mappings (disks offline, altered NIC, disk order changes).

Resolution

• No further action required from Broadcom. Customers facing this issue should work with Cohesity Support for remediation.