Hosts keep failing to go into maintenance mode

[Gabrie1]

Hi,

vCenter 6.5u3, recently upgraded from 5.5. Now working hard to reinstall all hosts with 6.5u3 (not upgrading but fresh installs) and I notice that quite a number of hosts have issues going into maintenance mode. I have this happen in several clusters. Each cluster is always only 5.5u2 hosts or 6.5u3 hosts. I never mix them in a cluster.

What happens is that I do a cross cluster VMotion of the VMs, then when the host is empty, I put the host in maintenance mode. But often the host hangs at 19%. Sometimes I can cancel the task. Sometimes I can fix it by doing a vpxa restart on the host and sometimes the task just hangs for hours. Even after I just shutdown and remove the host from the inventory, the task just keeps hanging.

Any tips? Or better make a support call?

Regards

Gabrie

[depping]

And you are sure that:

1. vMotion interfaces are correctly configured?

2. DRS is set to fully automated?

As usually either of the two of the reason for stopping at 19%

[Gabrie1]

Well, I VMotion the VMs away by hand because they go to a new cluster. Then when the host is empty and has no VMs anymore (also no powered off VMs), I put the host in maintenance mode.

[depping]

Strange. as 19% is typically the "VM" stage, so where it actually moves stuff.

[AhmedIbrahimVMw]

I think you're hitting this issue:

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/74966

But it is hard to confirm without having a look at the logs.

I'd suggest that you open a Support Request with VMware GSS, and they can investigate the issue further. Else, you can check the logs yourself, and if you think the KB matches what you have, then apply the workaround, or patch the hosts to 6.5 EP16.

Just our of curiosity, have you tried to put the hot into maintenance mode from ESXi Host Client (HTML5) directly or using command line from ESXi shell?

[Gabrie1]

Unfortunately I can't find the error message mentioned in the KB article. Also this applies to 6.5u3 and 6.7 hosts only. We are running 5.5u2 and in other cluster 6.5u2 hosts.