Failed to create swap file in vSAN environment, resulting in failed migration and power on VM with vMotion

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi
• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms

• Failed to power on VM on the destination ESXi host when migrated with vMotion
  
  
• Using a vSAN datastore
  
  
• " Failed to create swap file " and " Failed to power on VM " are recorded in vmware.log :
  

  YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.000Z In(05) vmx - [vob.swap.poweron.createfailure.status] Failed to create swap file '/vmfs/volumes/vsan:<UUID>/<UUID>/<VM-Name>.vswp' : Failure
  YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.000Z In(05) vmx - [msg.vmmonVMK.creatVMFailed] Could not power on virtual machine: Failure.
  YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.000Z In(05) vmx - [msg.monitorLoop.createVMFailed.vmk] Failed to power on VM.

• The swapobjd.log on the destination ESXi records "Bad parameter (0xbad0007)", causing the creation of the vSAN vswp object to fail.
  

  YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.000Z Er(11) swapobjd[0000000]: 00000000: OBJLIB-VSANOBJ: VsanObjGetExtParams: Could not unmarshal extended attributes: Bad parameter (0xbad0007).
  <snip>
  YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.000Z Er(11) swapobjd[0000000]: 00000000:SwapObjCreateFileInt:298: Failed to create object /vmfs/volumes/vsan:<UUID>/<UUID>/<VM-Name>.vswp (Invalid argument).

Environment

VMware vSAN 8.0

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Cause

This is a known issue in vSAN.

Resolution

Rerun the vMotion to migrate the VM.

This issue has been fixed in vSAN 9.0, and we are planning a release with the fix for vSAN 8.0.