"Virtual Machine is powered off"

[FERC_ESX1]

We had a VM that was not responding to pings, and the console from VC would not open. We looked at the events for the server in VC and it reported the event "Virtual Machine on servername is powered off." We made a couple of attempts to start the VM from VC with no success, and then tried (also with no success) directly from the ESX Host. The error message was "A general system error occurred"

From there we decided to migrate the VM to a different host, and to try powering it on from there. On the new server we got an error message "The attempted operation cannot be performed in the current state (Powered On)."

We could then ping the VM and attach to it from the console. The user that was logged into the VM before all this happened was still logged in, and there were no signs on the VM that there were any problems"

Has anyone seen this before, and does anyone know what the cause of this is?

[petedr]

I don't know if this will address your issue or not but I have had a few situations in the past when I haven't been able to open the VM console from VC and it looks in VC that the VM is powered off but it is not. In those couple of situations I restarted the mgmt-vmware service ( service mgmt-vmware restart ) and that resolved my issue.

[Troy_Clavell]

if restarting the mgmt service doesn't work and the VM will still not power on, try removing it from inventory in virtual center then add it back in.

[FERC_ESX1]

If it were the case that the management agents were not working properly, then all the servers on the host would be non-responsive. Or at least it seems like that would be true.

[petedr]

Maybe, like I was saying I wasn't sure if that would resolve your issue or not.