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vMotion fails at 9% on ESXi 5.0u1

Posted on 08 May 2012

A collegue of mine sent along a solution to a problem he recently encountered (thanks Jason D).  A 6 node cluster of ESXi 5.0 u1 hosts experienced a power loss and went down hard.  After the hosts were restarted and came back from the unexpected shut down he noticed that he was unable to vMotion virtual machines in that cluster.  DRS was also unable to move any VMs around to balance load.  The only way to move VMs between hosts was powering them off and using cold migration.

Any time a vMotion was atempted it would fail at 9% with the following error “A general system error occured: Failed to initialize migration at source.  Error 0xbad0060.  Necessary module isn’t loaded”.   Attemps to disabled and re-enable vMotion in the host advanaced options or on the port group did not solve the issue.  Here is the solution he came across:

NOTE: VMware has a KB listed here on this.

1. SSH to the host
2. Check if migration module is running ‘vmkload_mod -l | grep migrate’ .  You shouldn’t see anything loaded.
3. Disable vMotion on kernel port group.
4. Load the module ‘vmkload_mod migrate’
5. Verify module is now loaded ‘vmkload_mod -l | grep migrate’.  You should seee the migrate module loaded.
6. Restart managment agents on host ‘services.sh restart’ and wait for host to reconnect in vCenter.
7. Enable vMotion on kernel port group.
8. Test vMotion and if working it is recommended you evacuate the host and reboot and check step 2 and vMotion functionality again.

As always all cautions apply and your milage may vary.  Don’t do this if you don’t know what you’re doing.  If you bork your host I don’t know you.  Thanks again Jason D. for the information.