Maintenance Mode attempt leaves VM @ 16% migrated

[smackthat]

I put one of four hosts into maintenance mode and it never finished, leaving one VM at 16%. I cant do any tasks to the host and I cant cancel the migration or maintenance mode. I tried rebooting VC, tried rebooting the host via VC, but not CLI yet.

How do I resolve this issue?

[Jae_Ellers]

Scroll down or resort the tasks list and find the "Entering Maintenance Mode" task. Right click & cancel.

Then edit your vm properties and disconnect any cd or floppy drives and internal only networks.

Once out of maintenance mode a manual migration will provide substantially more meaningful feedback.

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[smackthat]

The only tasks left uncompleted is "Migrate Virtual Machine" and the target is my VM left at 16%. I rgt click it and cancel is greyed out and unselectable.

[smackthat]

...also, the majority of the tasks on both the host and the vm are grey, drastically limiting what I can do...

[ejward]

What version of ESX are you running? I get these issues all the time since upgrading to 3.5. And when you right-click to cancel, the option is gray'd out. I've had to bring a host down hard with all of it's VMs to fix this. Sometimes I'll go into maintenence Mode and nothing will happen. Or, when updating a host. I'll click remediate, it'll say "remediating entity 2%" and just sit there making no attempt to vmotion any VMs off the host. I've had to get into the habit of testing the host first before remediating patches by putting it into maintenence mode. If that works, then I patch.

Since I've patched all my hosts, it seems to happen less.

[smackthat]

I am running ESX3.5 and VC2.5. I was actually putting the host in maint mode so i could update it with the latest...

[ejward]

If you're using Update manager in 3.5 it should put it in maint mode for you. If you put it in maint mode yourself then use Update manager, you've got to manually take it out of maint mode just before the end of the updates or it will stay in maint mode forever.

[smackthat]

totally, and I knew I was doing it the 'manual' way, but it still should work either way and not leave VMs partially migrated. So how can I cancel, or force finish the VM migration?

[ejward]

You have to kill a process on the host. I had posted out here last week with the same issue and someone else said I had to kill a process. It didn't work. That's when I just bounced the host. HA kicked in and started the VMs on another host. I can't find my post though.