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tman24
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

vMotion not showing available hosts

I've just completed an upgrade from 3 x ESXi 5.0 hosts and a vCenter 5.1 appliance (Essentials Plus) to ESXi 6.0.5050593 and VCSA 6.5.5973321. This is a fully supported VMware setup. I upgraded the licenses and applied them to the new setup ok.

One very strange observation is that when I try and vmotion a VM to another host, if I select 'Change compute resource only', invariably the only destination host I'll see is the host the VM is currently running on - no other cluster hosts will show. If though, I select 'Change both compute resource and storage', I can expand the cluster and see all hosts. This method of migrating the VM will work, but I have to 'fake' a datastore change selection.

Things I've verified are;

It happens in both the Flash and HTML UI's.

Sometimes I will see all the migration hosts, but not all the time and very inconsistently

The message pre-migration will always show 'Compatability checks succeeded'.

I thought initially it was out of date VMware Tools, and it certainly looked more promising when tools was updated to 10.0.9 (build 10249), but then it all seemed to revert back and the same things happen. Is this a bug? I know I'm not running the latest ESXi version, or even the latest build of ESXi 6.0, but I'm not quite ready for that yet. It never happened in 5.x.

Ideas?

Thanks

29 Replies
gbaughma
Contributor
Contributor

Make sure that all of the datastores for the VM you are trying to migrate exist on the target host.

I had this problem, and discovered that all of my datastores were not on the target, so it wouldn't give me the option to migrate a VM over there.

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lmoglie
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi tman24

I got a same issue. Supposing that such configuration was working correctly in the previous version before the upgrading and nothing has changed. So, try to check if any node is correctly licensed and recognized correctly from the license services (from the web client). After that if they are missed from the license tab but are working properly on the cluster, login into the host by ssh and restart the services:

/etc/init.d/hostd restart

/etc/init.d/vpxa restart

then try to vMotion again.

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KKrtz
Contributor
Contributor

Hello.

I am running into the same issue since upgrade to 6.5. On some VMs (same host) I am able to vMotion to another host. Other are not working!

So far the only "trick" which helps is to click on "open console" and close it. Afterwards I am able to vMotion to another host for this VM. Seems like a bug!

Behavior in Flash and HTML5  version is the same...

Any advises?

Thx

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SEA5C
Contributor
Contributor

Hi,

I had the same issue.  I solved this issue by changing the "CD/DVD drive 1" and "Floppy drive 1"  to "Client device". You have to do on all Virtual machines by selecting the "Edit options". Then perform the vMotion, you will  see all available servers in the cluster. I am using 6.7 version.

Regards,

Vasu

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ereal123
Contributor
Contributor

Yes, I'm using vCSA 6.5 and on the VM I was trying to vmotion, under CD/DVD I had to select client device instead of local datastore in order to be able to see all hosts listed!

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ThomasDwan
Contributor
Contributor

Just had this issue myself now in ESX 6.5, with all updates available as of 24/07/2018 installed.

The issue for me turned out to be that the 2 VMs affected for me had Virtual Optical Drives added, rather than any snapshots being present. The drives didn't have any ISO's loaded, and they weren't 'connected' to the VMs, but them being added to the config was enough.

As soon as I edited the settings of these two VMs, and removed the Optical Drives, i was able to move them to any other server in the farm.

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GerberFCU
Contributor
Contributor

This is solved the problem!

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doma2k
Contributor
Contributor

Agreed. This might be likely the cause.

In addition, if you migrate both CPU and Storage on the next screen it is showing info about attached devices..

This way you can edit the VM hardware settings accordingly. For example by choosing Client Device to CD/DVD drive

pastedImage_0.png

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BrassMunkie
Contributor
Contributor

In my particular case, I had not re-added the connection to the SAN in which our VMs are stored. vMotion was configured and the single host was not available in any list. I stumbled across this question searching for answers. I thought I'd add my situation if it helps anyone else having the same problem. I skipped a step in reconfiguring the new host. Once I added the access to the SAN again, the host showed up and all was fine for vMotion events. Hope this helps someone out there. Thanks for all the input.

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Mukz9
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Please refer to the KB article VMware Knowledge Base.  It appears to be a similar issue.

As per this KB, the workaround is as follows

  1. From the vSphere Web Client select an affected Virtual Machine and click Launch Remote console. Once it is loaded, close the session
  2. Run the migration again.

Thanks

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