Q. How can I diagnose a VMware vMotion that fails at 10 percent complete?

Greg Shields

October 6, 2010

1 Min Read
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A. A recent VMware knowledgebase article merits an extra look. This article discusses the series of troubleshooting steps you might consider when experiencing a vMotion failure at the 10 percent mark.

The article describes how vMotion eventually times out and may produce one or more of the following four messages within vCenter:

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 vMotion failure is always a bad day. It sometimes causes problems with the virtual machine (VM), although this tends to be rare. More importantly, a vMotion that you initiate is often a part of a much larger activity, such as evacuating VMs off a host that's about to fail or moving VMs prior to performing maintenance or upgrades.

The article goes on to identify a thirteen-step troubleshooting plan that you should run through to identify the problem. Rather than copy those steps into this post, as they are comprehensive, I'll point you directly to the post. If you're experiencing problems with vMotion, start here.

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