Error connecting: VMX connection handshake failed for mks of...

[vincikb]

Has anyone seen this message before? This happened on a machine which I have 3 snapshots of the machine and went to power off the VM. or connecting: VMX connection handshake failed for mks of /vmfs/volumes/4542ba37-e49f5844-7060-00163581980d/TestPatch01/TestPatch01.vmx

Do you want to try again? Yes or No

I clicked on Yes and the message went away.

[violet68]

i had the same problem, and i found out that the VMWare tools was out of date, reinstall it, it was ok.

[mnasir]

Hey

It was a bad sector on the cd ( The vm CD-rom was mapped to esx host's cd-rom; NOT A GOOD PRACTICE). I tested the cd on my pc and found out that my windows explorer was hanging. I removed the cd from the ESX host (should have mount to my nfs iso data store instead) and it resolved the issue. Now I have over 30 vm running and none of them has any CD-ROM drive, I just use file share for my windows vms. And it works like a charm.

[araju]

Hi,

Check the Virtual Center service, it has to run.

[dblaisdell]

We have discovered that we can make this error happen reliably if we do the following:

1. Virtualize Citrix Presentation Server 4.5

2. Connect to said virtual machine.

3. Launch the VI Client

4. Click on the console tab of the Citrix vm you are currently connected to via a Citrix ICA connection.

This reliably hoses that server for a while. It eventually comes back if you hit OK to a message from another console connection.

David

[bludden]

I got a similar error for a VMX connection handshake and it was due to a VMFS partition running out of space - another admin was also trying to use that disk resizing feature in the GUI (new for 3.5 and I dont know how it works or what it does) so that may have had a hand in it as well.

Brian

[mdsullivan]

The CDROM thing was the issue for me. I put a Windows CD in my ESX server yesterday afternoon to load IIS and SNMP on a Windows VM. Then today, only about an hour ago, 2 of my 10 hosts on that ESX server went offline with the "VMX connection handshake failed..." message. I powered them off and back on - same thing. I started researching - about the time calls and email started coming in - and saw this post. I remembered the CD I put in and ran into the server room and ejected it. Then I changed the settings for both VMs to NOT connect the CDROM at power on. Powered them back and and they are fine.

[ReggieSmith]

I have had this problem a few times and it seems that each time it happened, the VM had a resource LIMIT on the CPU of zero. Not usre how that happened becasue it has only happened rarely, but changing that setting, of cource, cleared the issue for me.

[HP68]

Also got this at 2 different customers in the last weeks when uppgrading their ESXs. The first time I didn't find any solution for it other than to create a new VM with the same diskfiles, and then it worked.

Yesterday I happened to look under Resource Allocation in the cluster and saw the same thing as Reggie Smith, the machine was limited to 0 MHz. Changed it, and then the VM started as usual.

Notices that a couple of other machines had some strange values in the limit-field, that the customer havn't entered. Maybe a bug in the 3.5 u3.

In both cases I have upgraded to 3.5U3 and enabled Enhanced VMotion in the cluster.

[GregMoore]

I was recently working with a customer with this same issue on a VM that wouldnt power up. Customer recently did a colo-move and this VM had come up as orphaned. Customer had to remove from inventory and re-add the VM, but customer had not set the Guest OS selection properly. OS was Win2k8 64 bit, but the VM settings had win2k8 32 bit selected. Changed the Guest OS type to win2k8 64 bit and the VM came up with no errors.