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nkv
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Can't cancel a task in vSphere

Hi Everyone,

I am unable to a cancel a tasks in vSphere. When I right click i see the "Cancel" option as greayed out.

Questions 1: I am coming across these situations when trying to take out a host out of maintenance mode task which i started. I started the maintenance mode but it going on since a long time. When I right click i see cancel option is greyed out.

Questions 2: I also come across this when i am taking a snapshot of VM and it never completes the task. Due to this I cant power on the vm or perform any task

Any help or guidence?

Thanks

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lamw
Community Manager
Community Manager

This is not unheard of, when a task is kicked off ... there's a grace period depending on the operation in which you're able to cancel. Once it goes beyond this value, you will not be able to cancel the task. Eventually it won't receive a response back and either it'll timeout or just error out.

The 2nd is a known issue as the time for committing a snapshot will vary depending on the size and the task itself actually times out trying to wait for the process to complete, even though it's still processing. To track an actual snapshot commit, you can follow these instructions listed in this VMware KB: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1007566

For #1 just make sure if you have running VMs and it's part of a cluster, that you have DRS enabled else the VMs will just sit there, I've seen this happen in the past and the task will eventually timeout. Unfortunately there's not much you can do, best thing is to investigate on why it didn't go into maintenance mode in the specified interval, may want to look at the ESX logs or contact VMware Support if you continuously see this problem.

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William Lam

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Twitter: @lamw

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