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Diagnosing a vMotion failure at 10% or higher in vCenter Server (1003734)

Symptoms

  • VMware vMotion fails at 10%
  • vMotion times out
  • The VirtualCenter/vCenter Server reports these errors:
    • Migration will cause the virtual machine's configuration to be modified to preserve the CPU feature requirements for it's guest operating system.
    • Operation timed out
    • A general system error occurred:
      Failed waiting for data. Error 16. Invalid argument
    • A general system error occurred: failed to look up VMotion destination resource pool object

Purpose

This article guides you through diagnosing any issues that may have caused vMotion to fail at 10%.

Resolution

 
Validate that each troubleshooting step below is true for your environment. Each step provides instructions or a link to a document, in order to eliminate possible causes and take corrective action as necessary. The steps are ordered in the most appropriate sequence to isolate the issue and identify the proper resolution. Do not skip a step. 
  1. Ensure that vMotion is enabled on all ESX/ESXi hosts. For more information refer to Enabling VMotion and Fault tolerance logging (1036145).

    Determine if resetting the Migrate.Enabled setting on both the source and destination ESX or ESXi hosts addresses the vMotion failure. For more information on this issue, see VMotion fails at 10% with the error: A general system error occurred: Migration failed while copying data, Broken Pipe (1013150).

  2. Verify that VMkernel network connectivity exists using vmkping. For more information, see Testing vmkernel network connectivity with the vmkping command (1003728).

  3. Verify that VMkernel networking configuration is valid. For more information, see Unable to set VMkernel gateway as there are no VMkernel interfaces on the same network (1002662).

  4. Verify that the virtual machine is not configured to use a device that is not valid on the target host. For more information, see Troubleshooting migration compatibility error: Device is a connected device with a remote backing (1003780).

  5. If Jumbo Frames are enabled (MTU of 9000)  (9000 -8 bytes (ICMP header) -20 bytes (IP header) for a total of 8972), ensure that vmkping is run like vmkping -d -s 8972 <destinationIPaddress>. You may experience problems with the trunk between two physical switches that have been misconfigured to an MTU of 1500.

  6. Verify that Name Resolution is valid on the host. For more information, see Identifying issues with and setting up name resolution on ESX/ESXi Server (1003735).

  7. Verify that Console OS network connectivity exists. For more information, see Testing network connectivity with the Ping command (1003486).

  8. Verify if the ESXi/ESX host can be reconnected or if reconnecting the ESX/ESXi host resolves the issue. For more information, see Changing an ESXi or ESX host's connection status in vCenter Server (1003480).

  9. Verify that the required disk space is available. For more information, see Investigating disk space on an ESX host (1003564).

  10. Verify that time is synchronized across environment. For more information, see Verifying time synchronization across an ESX/ESXi host environment (1003736).

  11. Verify that valid limits are set for the virtual machine being vMotioned. For more information, see VMware vMotion fails if target host does not meet reservation requirements (1003791).

  12. Verify that hostd is not spiking the console. For more information, see Checking for resource starvation of the ESX Service Console (1003496).

  13. This issue may be caused by SAN configuration. Specifically, this issue may occur if zoning is set up differently on different servers in the same cluster. 

  14. Verify and ensure that the log.rotateSize parameter in the virtual machine's configuration file is not set to a very low value. For more information, see vMotion fails at 10% with the error: Operation timed out (2007343).
Note: If your problem still exists after trying the steps in this article:

Additional Information

As per ftPerl consumes 100% CPU after enabling VMware High Availability (1012871), an issue with ftPerl may cause vMotion failures at 10%. This issue is resolved in VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 5 and vCenter Server 4.0, which are available from the VMware Download Center.
 

Tags

cannot-vmotion  no-network-vmotion  vmotion-fails-at-10%

See Also

Update History

06/18/2012 - Updated for 5.x 03/13/2013 - Added additional symptom

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