vMotion issue stucks at 14% operation timed out

ESXi 5.5 / vCenter 5.5

Today I was asked to put one host in maintained mode and shutdown the ESXi server. Prior to this I had to relocate the VMs in to different ESXi servers in same cluster. After the checking the DRS setting, I just put server in maintained mode. Most of the VMs were migrated successfully except one VM. What I did is cancel the maintained task from the vCenter task list and try to manually migrate this VM. After the manual migration initiated below issues and error messages were appeared.

Experienced symptoms

vMotion task stucks at 14%

After few min later task was canceled saying Operation timed out

After I checked the vMotion network and everything related but nothing wrong with the settings because all other VMs were migrated successfully. After I decide to perform a storage vMotion to verify is this only related with host vMotion but unfortunately, it’s given different error.

Finally I searched through google and found this VMware KB  which has been describe the same issue as mine one. Thanks for the VMware.

As per the KB article there should be two .vswp files in VM directory. Normally there are only one vswp file must be there. As VMware says I could see two files as below screen shot.

VMware recommend powering down the VM to fix this issue, but I tried to minimize the down time of the production VM. So, I tried to find the lock outsource of the duplicate vswp file by using VMKSFSTOOL command in ESXi shell.

Eg: vmkfstool -D “path to vswp file”

As per the above screen shot it was locked by one of the ESXi servers in the cluster. I tried restarting that host but unfortunately lock has been moved to different ESXi server. So finally, I had to coordinate the downtime with application team and shut the VM. Once power down I was able to vMotion the VM and finally performed a storage vMotion and duplicate vswp file disappeared.

Thanks for reading. Stay safe!!!