ESXi Host Image Compliance status "Unknown" on Lifecycle Manager due to lost access to boot media

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• One of more ESXi hosts display "Unknown" image compliance status under the Lifecycle Manager (LCM) Updates tab with errors similar to below:
  

  A failure occurred when starting a host compliance check operation on host '<ESXi_host_fqdn>' : Error: com.vmware.vapi.std.errors.not_allowed_in_current_state Messages: com.vmware.esx.task.contention<Another task is in progress. Please retry later.>

  
  
  A failure occurred when starting an operation on the entity 'host-######' : Failed to write lock entities host-###### due to concurrent activity as part of another operation
  
  

• Upon taking SSH session as root to the affected ESXi Hosts and running the command ls -l from the root directory , their bootbanks' symlinks can be found broken (in red color) .Executing the command ls /bootbank from the SSH session to the ESXi host might return "No such file or directory".

Cause

The affected ESXi hosts have lost access to their underlying boot media, resulting in the loss of both the bootbank and altbootbank partitions. Since LCM requires a healthy and accessible file system on the ESXi host (specifically the bootbanks) to determine image state, the compliance checks fail with status unknown.

Resolution

To resolve the issue, migrate the virtual machines out of the affected ESXi host(s) and then work on recovering the bootbank connectivity by following Bootbank cannot be found at path '/bootbank'