Maint mode not evacuating machines

[entsol]

We are hoping someone can help. We are currently running VI 3.5 with VC2.5. DRS in full or Semi automatic mode appears to be working fine.We appear to have an issue with DRS when we put ESX servers into maint mode. It does not evacuate the running or powered off machines. After an hours wait we them move them manually via Vmotion and they move with no issue and the machine goes into maint mode. We assumed that in fully automatic mode the VM's would evacuate but it just doesnt seem to happen.

Has anyone got any suggestions ?

Thanks

[williambishop]

Are you setting your DRS to full(make any changes that give even a small benefit). It's been a while, but it seems ours had to be set that way.

[entsol]

William,

Thanks for the response. We have tried DRS in fully automatic with it both set to conservative right the way to aggressive and it does not seem to make any diffrence.

[Nokin]

This is most commonly caused by virtual machines having active connections to physical devices (cd/dvd, serial etc,) what normally happen is users create virtual machine that connect cd/dvd on powerup. This should be avoided as it 1, prevents evacuations as you are seeing and 2, it wastes resources. Cancel the maint mode. check you virtual machines and disconnect any cd/dvd or serial (doubt serial is in use) and try again.

I've had this happen several times.

Let me know if this helps your situation.

Sam

[espi3030]

As a test, try to right click on a vm that does not evacuate and select Migrate (you won't do it just yet). In the migration wizard select a host in the same cluster that the vm would be moved to if this was automatic. See if it passes the validation process, you might see here what is keeping your vm's from evacuating.

[Nokin]

In the scenario I mentioned above the VM will Vmotion fine but still wont Evacuate.

[espi3030]

I had the same issue just this morning. I had a VM that relocated itself via DRS to another host within the same cluster this past weekend (as expected), when I attempted to put the host in maint mode it just sat there. So I tested via right click "Migrate" and found out that the VM had the CDROM drive device /dev/cd connected ( I found in the validation step). Once I disconnected the CDROM, and repeated the place in maint mode with vm still on, they successfully moved to another host and completed the maint mode. I know it sounds strange, but that is what hapened!

I also read something once about a patch/update fixing a similar issue to what you are experiencing, I will see if I can find that info and let you know. Are your ESX hosts up to date?

Message was edited by: espi3030

[entsol]

All,

Thanks for your responses. The manual migrations work fine everytime. We have checked all our VM's and all the CD's are connected as "device type" Client device". As I said migrations validate ok . We can even manually migrate all the VM's off the host manually and it will go into maint mode. With regards to the patching we were going to try Update01 if we could not fix the problem. We are reasonably new to the product and thought we were doing something wrong.

[Nokin]

Disconnect all the cd/dvd drives. Even if they are set to connect to client devices the evacuation will fail. Connect the CD/DVD only as needed (clear the check for connect on powerup) This does not prevent you from using the cd/dvd as needed you just connect when you have to load the CD/DVD. Once all virtual machines have the CD/DVD disconnected you should be able to properly evacuate the host.

Sam

[entsol]

Can confirm that all CD's are not connected. But I have now got further and corrected the problem but I cannot explain how it happened. I removed DRS and HA and just added DRS back in. Put one machine into Maint mode and it worked !!!!!!!!! All machine evacuated. Took it out of Maint mode and DRS load balanced. Put another ESX in maint mode and all worked. Added HA back in and it is still working. I dont know if that was a mis-config or just a quirk/ Bug but it now appears to be working ........ Thanks

[espi3030]

The proof is there, the VM's would not automatically migrate off while CD devices were connected. And they could when they were not connected, I agree with Nokin I only connect CD devices when needed for exactly this reason. I am glad you got your issue worked out.

[Ken_Cline]

Thread moved to a more appropriate forum.

Ken Cline

Technical Director, Virtualization

Wells Landers

VMware Communities User Moderator