Virtual Machine with alarm "DFW Vmotion Failure" and is unable vmotion to another ESX Host

Products

• VMware vDefend Firewall
• VMware vDefend Firewall with Advanced Threat Prevention

Issue/Introduction

VM with NSX alarm "DFW Vmotion Failure" and vcenter error of "Migration failed after VM memory precopy" is unable to Vmotion to another ESX host.

Alarm from NSX Manager


Error stack showin vcenter UI. This Error will show every attempt to vMotion to another ESX host.

• 17:16:18.330Z vMotion migration [727484] failed: remote host <ESX-Host-IP> failed with status Failure.
• 17:16:18.430Z vMotion migration [955007] failed to asynchronously receive and apply state from the remote host: Failure.
• 17:16:18.430Z Failed waiting for data. Error 195887105. Failure.
• 17:16:18.430Z Migration failed after VM memory precopy. Please check vmkernel log for true error.

Another observation in the ESX> var/run/log/vmkernal.log shows 'lookup failure' for the same VM.

• 17:16:18.430Z In(182) vmkernel: cpu49:29331)pf_lookup_fqdn_tree: VM lookup failed, vm_uuid 'UUID of VM'
• 17:16:18.576Z In(182) vmkernel: cpu53:29332)pf_lookup_fqdn_tree: VM lookup failed, vm_uuid 'UUID of VM'

Environment

NSX 4.2.x

Cause

• In rare scenarios a VM UUID information is not found during the vMotion request, the "export data length" is not updated properly.
• This export data is not present in the vMotion process to move VM to another ESX Host, resulting in vMotion failure. 

Resolution

A fix is coming in a future release. 

Workaround
Put the VM in the NSX DFW exclusion list and remove for a quicker resolution.