vSphere VMotion shows "the virtual machine must be powered off to perform this action" warning but works

[smaunsell]

Hi, VMware newbie here but am learning quickly.

We have 4x ESX4.0.0.261974 hosts with ~30 VMs.Yesterday I needed to install APC's PowerChute Network Shutdown software on the hosts so put them, one by one, into Maintenance Mode which cleared the VMs to other hosts. I installed PCNS (and the bundled Java) smoothly but when coming out of Maintenance Mode the host would enabled HA but disable 30sec later. Several attempts to enable HA did the same thing and I needed to restart the hosts. VMs were then automatically migrated back. It only put about 5 VMs on the last host when there had been 10-12 previously so I decided to VMotion some across but was presented with a warning on the first page of VMotion saying "the virtual machine must be powered off to perform this action". Googling didn't show much but I did find someone who had the same problem but migrated anyway and said it worked with no problem. So I tried it, with a non-critical VM, and it did indeed work perfectly. It did, however, give another warning when I select the host that I'd be moving to that no OS heatbeats were detected meaning that either the host was not responding (but it was working perfectly fine) or there is an issue with VMware Tools configuration. Going through the process does not give the heartbeat warning but still gives the first warning.

Any ideas?

[idle-jam]

there are two possibilities:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1005930

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1017486

as for the no heartbeat check this out: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003805 .. i would normally ignore such messages as it have not done any damanges to my VM yet ..

[smaunsell]

Some, but not all, VMs had out of date VMware Tools so I upgraded them but still had the issue.

Then I looked at the UUIDs and found they were mismatching. I'll get our service provider to look at that. I'd be pretty sure that is the cause but will have to wait to confirm.

Thx

[marcin8]

Hi

I think you actually do not have errors there. When you are trying to migrate the running machine you will get at the bottom of the window the prompt saying "The vitual machine must be powered off to perform this function" - that prompt address the third option (grayed out) "Change both host and datastore" and basically says that you have to switch the vm off to do that. I attached to screenshots - you can see that on one of them there is no prompt - it's the case when I wanted to migrate the VM which was switched off. Hope it helps.

Marcin.

[smaunsell]

Yes I saw that KB. It's not very helpful when you have contradictory KBs from VMware.....one saying it is a problem and one saying it isn't.

This issue did not arrive until after the hosts were restarted after I installed the PCNS software. I was using VMMotion without any "errors" at all before that.

Having a warning/error is confusing. If I take the KB that says it's not a problem at its word then I would just VMotion a critical server...but then what happens if, on that day, it decides that it isn't a warning that can be ignored and it actually means what it says??? I've just shutdown a critical server.

I'll get the UUID mismatch issue resolved and see what happens.

UPDATE: It might, or might not, be worth nothing that on most VMs (those that are running) the 3rd option (Change both host and datastore) is greyed out. We have some VMs that were used as templates that are powered off, along with some old VMs that are not required that are also powered off, and the 3rd option is available on these but selecting any option does not give this warning.