Relocation of VM Guest fails.

[Pratt]

I migrated a VM Guest from one ESX Host to local storage on another VM Host that is a member of a cluster. However, when I migrated the storage from the local disk the SAN storage which is shared amoung the cluster hosts the following occurred:

When the status showed 100% complete I noticed that VM Guest with the name VM_Guest_01 showed in the cluster and quickly a guest machine with the name "Unknown" appeared, changed to VM_Guest_01 and then to "VM_Guest_01 orphaned." I was unable to Power On the guest. I migrated back the original host and it powered on and is working correctly.

I checked the logs and found the following entries:

• Renamed VM_Guest_01 from unknown to VM_Guest_01

• BIOS ID (4562eb42-xxxxxxx) of VM_Guest_01 conflicts with that of VM_Guest_01

• The MAC address (00:00:00.xxxxxx) of VM_Guest_01 conflicts with MAC assigned to VM_Guest_01

• Changed BIOS UUID from 4562eb42-xxxxxxx to 4561ac39-xxxxxxx for VM_Guest_01

• Changed MAC address from 00:00:00.xxxxxx to ab:01:bf.xxxxxx for adapter Virtual Machine Network VLAN811 for VM_Guest_01

• VM_Guest_01 does not exit

Does anyone have any suggestions or explanations as to why this might happen? I have migrated about 20 machines this way and this is the first time this has happened.

Thank you.

[lholling]

Well the non-technical answer that I can give you is that something went wrong.

Based on the log it got upset when it tried to covert over the VM files to the new ESX server. All you can do is delete the VM from you Inventory and remove the directory (if it is not deleted by deleting it from the Inventory) and then just do the migration again. There could have been a hiccup in Networking just at the wrong time causing the problem.

Leonard...

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[niemann1]

Same problem here, some migrations work but some failed with the following entries in the virtual center event log:

info 15.01.2008 13:04:46 Task: Relocate Virtual Machine storage

info 15.01.2008 13:04:47 Relocating vmguest1 in ESXCenter1 from esx1 to esx1

info 15.01.2008 13:08:13 Discovered unknown on esx1 in ESXCenter1

info 15.01.2008 13:08:13 Invalid name for unknown on esx1 in ESXCenter1. Renamed from to unknown

info 15.01.2008 13:08:13 Virtual Machine unknown is connected

warning 15.01.2008 13:08:17 Renamed vmguest1 from unknown to vmguest1 in ESXCenter1

error 15.01.2008 13:08:17 BIOS ID (502e45c3-1099-b2bb-8b6b-27cad671ad2c) of vmguest1 conflicts with that of vmguest1

error 15.01.2008 13:08:17 The static MAC address (00:50:56:01:02:50) of vmguest1 conflicts with MAC assigned to vmguest1

warning 15.01.2008 13:08:22 Changed BIOS UUID from 502e45c3-xxxxxx to 502e52e7-xxxxxx for vmguest1 on esx1 in ESXCenter1

warning 15.01.2008 13:08:26 vmguest1 does not exist on esx1 in ESXCenter1

error 15.01.2008 13:08:35 Failed to relocate virtual machine 'vmguest1' in ESXCenter1

I guess that it could be a race condition when the files are copied and the esx server or the virtual center discover the files before the file transfer is completely over.

Sometimes it worked after I removed the orphaned entry and started another migration.

I'm sorry that I have no better guess.

[niemann1]

I just searched a little bit and found

http://communities.vmware.com/message/649373#649373 and

http://communities.vmware.com/message/721170#721170 which describe perhaps the same problem.

[mike_laspina]

Just a thought.

It looks like an generated address issue or guid mismatch. When a machine is moved with VI and the address was a standalone type it will change it to a VI type so that it can be moved from host to host without network issues. This could cause some interesting errors....