ESXi Hosts Get Stuck at 19% While Entering Maintenance Mode During ESXi Upgrade Activity

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

When attempting to place ESXi hosts within a cluster into maintenance mode, the operation remains stuck at 19%. The vSphere Client displays the following message, indicating that a virtual machine task must complete before proceeding:

“Waiting for <VM_NAME> to complete task: vim.vm.Snapshot.remove”

Cause

The host remained in an intermediate state while the system waited for the consolidation task to complete, which stalled the maintenance mode transition.

Resolution

The host remains in the “Entering Maintenance Mode” state until the pending snapshot consolidation task is completed. There is no timeout for this process, vCenter will continue to wait until the task finishes.

Once the snapshot consolidation completes successfully, the virtual machine will automatically vMotion to another available host as part of the maintenance mode workflow.

After all dependent tasks are complete, the host will enter maintenance mode and proceed with the upgrade operation.