Vmotion: Failed to open the swap file

[t07mm]

Hi All,

I have just upgraded to VI2.5 and ESX 3.5 and applied the critical patches and now my Vmotion stop at 90% with 'A general system error occurred: Failed to open the swap file'.

Now this used to work, my VM currently sit on an NFS mount whilst I wait for my SAN to be installed? But this all worked in VI2 & ESX 3.02

Any ideas welcome

Cheers

Chris

[sonofploppy]

Hi Chris,

Have you seen this forum, may find usefull......

Good luck, Paul

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/122229

[t07mm]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the link, it doesn't really help.

Strange thing was that I created a new clustered and moved two of my ESX hosts that had no VMs on. Then move a VM over, which was off.

Started the VM, then I could Migrate!!!

So moved all my other VMs (had to shut them down). And last night was working fine.

However, this morning I now have the same problem

Most annoying as under VC 2 and ESX 3.0.2 it worked flawlessly. Luckily I'm still in a pre-production stage.

Regards

Chris

[t8bloom]

I'm having the same problem -- some of my VMs migrate fine, others fail with the same swap file message. On further investigation it looks like the VMs with this issue still show "Virtual Machine Version: 3". My current guess is that I need to shut them down and do a manual update to the VM Hardware to solve this. I'll repost once I can see if this works.

[t07mm]

Hi t8bloom,

If that fixes the that would be excellent! I have already shutdown all my VMs, but how do you do a hardware refresh on the VM and where do you check the VM version?

Thanks

Chris

[t8bloom]

Yep, that did it! Once your virtual machines are shut down, you can right-click on the machine from the left pane of the VirtualCenter client, and choose "upgrade Virtual Hardware". This will update the hardware spec from 3 to 4 and should solve your problem. However, while you have them down you may also want to make sure you don't have any hardware explicitly called out in your VMs, too. Ie, remove /dev/floppy and replace with "client device", remove any USB ports, etc. as these seem to get in the way of VMotion for me.

I think this should solve it for you!

[dkusic]

Hi, what is this "upgrade virtual hardware" function? I do not seem to have this in my Virtual Center. I'm having the same problem where VMotion fails at 90% because of a failure to open the swap file. I've tried commenting out the swap file location in the .vmx file, and naively changing the permissions on the .vswp file, all to no avail.

[t07mm]

In the end, I found that it was only one of the servers that I could not Vmotionj from and too.

After lots of logs being exchanged with HPs VM support, they said it was the Storage! Even though I had rebuilt the server using esx3.5 from scratch.

So in the end, all I had to do was remove the storage and re-add it using the FQDN and then it all worked fine.

Regards

Chris

[drewinator]

Remove the NFS storage and re-add? What if mine was installed using the IP address rather then FQDN?

[mlm1]

I found that removing and re-adding the NFS storage, either via IP or FQDN works.

However, you should make sure that all hosts use either FQDN or IP and not a mixture of both across hosts inside a cluster.

Cheers

Mark

[Ytsejamer1]

Yes, I would love to know where I can find these options for upgrading the Virtual Hardware within Virtual Center.

As for removing storage and readding it...that is somewhat of a problem if you're trying to migrate active VMs from one host to another...as the VMs on that host are using that storage. I don't think they'd take too kindly to having the rug pulled out from under them. My storage is IP based...and its consistent throughout the cluster.

I've tried the Mem.VMOverheadGrowth setting to 5 but that didn't change anything. Setting resource pool settings to normal didn't really do much except mess up the settings within one of my resource pools. I decided to stop before I really messed something up. Hmmm...still stumped.

[nhwuxiaojun]

I'm puzzled in this .could somebody tell me the way to resolve vmotion issue

Thanks all

[Ytsejamer1]

I found that updating to a newer version of VC did the trick. We went to update 3 and of course, update 4 came out a couple weeks later.

But all seems to be normal now.

[davidjerwood]

Did anyone manage to find a solution to this issue?

Would really like to know, have started to get the same issue this morning.

[mlm1]

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[DonH]

The option to upgrade the hardware is only available when the virtual is powered off and then again only if the machine is at a lower hardware level than the host..

[cgdii]

I just had this issue and am using Fiber Attached storage for SAN. I am migrating VMs to a newly built cluster using ESX 3.5 Update 4 Hosts and VC 2.5 Update 5. When vMotioning some VMs I am getting this error but none of the suggestions in this thread worked to resolve it. I did see any options to upgrade Virtual Hardware, so I must have already been at the most current levels. However while editing the settings of the VM, I noticied that if I powered off the VM, opened the settings for it, and then clicked ok it took longer than usual to save the config. After powering the VM back on, I was able to vMotion it with no issues. Hope this helps.