Image compliance scan fails during the vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) compliance check - "Error: com.vmware.vapi.std.errors.not_allowed_in_current_state Messages: com.vmware.esx.task.contention"

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi
• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• In the vCenter UI, the image compliance scan fails and reports the "Host status is unknown". The reported error is the following:
  
  A failure occurred when starting a host compliance check operation on host <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.>
  
  
• The vCenter /var/log/vmware/vmware-updatemgr/vum-server/vmware-vum-server.log  reports an error similar to the following:
  
  info vmware-vum-server[3521687] [Originator@6876 sub=Telemetry opID=########-####-####-####-############] [TelemetryManager 261] Sending telemetry data: {"@type":"pmanerrorreport","taskId":"########-####-####-####-############|########-####-####-####-############","entityId":"########-####-####-####-############|host-[MASKED MOID]","parentTaskId":"","errorMessageId":"com.vmware.vcIntegrity.lifecycle.HostScan.TaskApiError","errorMessage":"A failure occurred when starting a host compliance check operation on host '[FQDN]' : Error:\n   com.vmware.vapi.std.errors.notallowedincurrentstate\nMessages:\n   com.vmware.esx.task.contention\n","errorTime":"2026-07-24T12:36:58.321448Z"}


• The host /var/run/log/settingsd.log reports that there is a sync file which is causing an error:
  
  Er(11) settingsd[2100603]: error [ConfigStore:6763dd3700 opId=8def8###############################] [_CheckTaskContention]: Task sync file exists and contains 'PRECURSOR: ########-####-####-####-############', 2 retries left
  
  
• The host /var/vmware/lifecycle/lifecycle.task reports a 'PRECURSOR' task. The following is an example:

cat lifecycle.task
PRECURSOR: <########-####-####-####-############>

• Running the following commands against the host /var/vmware/lifecycle/task-status.json.db file returns the details of a software scan that has not completed:

/usr/lib/vmware/sqlite/bin/sqlite3 task-status.json.db
SQLite version 3.34.1 2021-01-20 14:10:07
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
sqlite> SELECT * from tasks where task_id='<########-####-####-####-############>';
<########-####-####-####-############>|com.vmware.esx.settingsdaemon.software.scan||RUNNING|2026-07-10T09:31:58.003Z|2026-07-10T09:31:58.748Z|2026-07-10T09:31:58.748Z||0|100||||[]

Environment

• VMware vSphere ESXi
• VMware vCenter Server

Cause

• The vLCM/Image Compliance is failing on each ESXi host because vCenter thinks the hosts are already executing another task when vCenter attempts to initiate the scan. This is due to a stale scan process on the local hosts lifecycle DB which never completes.

Resolution

1. Move the files lifecycle.task, task-status.json and task-status.json.db from their current location on each host to another directory.
   mv /var/vmware/lifecycle/lifecycle.task /<NEW DIRECOTRY NAME>
mv /var/vmware/lifecycle/task-status.json /<NEW DIRECOTRY NAME>
mv /var/vmware/lifecycle/task-status.json.db /<NEW DIRECOTRY NAME>


2. Restart the settingsd service on each of the hosts:
   /etc/init.d/settingsd restart
   
   
3. Run a compliance scan to see if it is successful for that host.

Additional Information

List of similar KBs with different causes and resolutions:

• ESXi Host Image Compliance status "Unknown" on Lifecycle Manager due to lost access to boot media
• Checking image compliance on ESXi fails with "Another task is already in progress" error