Comments on: HOW-TO: Recover from failed Storage VMotion

By: Kiran Shewale

Kiran Shewale — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:58:26 +0000

Thanks Arnim for this important blog about VM recover from failed storage vmotion.
Cheers!!!!!

By: Alex Dumont

Alex Dumont — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:06:19 +0000

This post was the exact answer to my problem (same error)! Thanks a lot for taking the time to publish this entry.

By: Macnet

Macnet — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:59:18 +0000

Cheers for this Anim (and Argyle).
Just needed the first section:
Create snapshot;
remove snapshot;
Migrated storage.
(it even cleared up after itself…)
Done

By: Arnim van Lieshout

Arnim van Lieshout — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:15:12 +0000

Try to power-on your VM first. If that doesn’t work, you have some sort of corruption on your VM.
Try to resolve the corruption/misconfiguration first.
Analyze the vmware.log file(s) to find out what is going wrong when powering-on your VM.

-Arnim

By: Philippe Hoste

Philippe Hoste — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:26:36 +0000

Hello

Me too I have a SVMotion failed. Now my server has his .vmdk on one LUN and all other files on the other and went power off. I’ve tried the procedure here above but it doesn’t work for me: it already fails when trying to create a snapshot: I get error VMControl -3: Invalid arguments. I’ve tried the exact same command on other servers and it works fine.
Can anybody help me ?

By: Arnim van Lieshout

Arnim van Lieshout — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:54:55 +0000

Chris,

Perhaps there’s some kind of corruption in this swap file, which prevents it from being moved.
I haven’t seen this behaviour before.
Did you try to power off the VM, delete swap file and clear the sched.swap.derivedName parameter in your .vmx file?
Perhaps this will recreate the swap file in the correct location.
If you still experience problems I suggest to open an SR with VMware Support or open a discussion on the VMTN forum

-Arnim

By: Chris Sprinkle

Chris Sprinkle — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:31:18 +0000

Also, I have an entry for sched.swap.dir in the .vmx file.

By: Chris Sprinkle

Chris Sprinkle — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:59:45 +0000

The swapfile is listed in the .vmx file and is actively used. There is no new swapfile in the new location.

I SVMotioned the VM again to a different datastore hoping that the swap file would change, but it remained in the original location.

By: Arnim van Lieshout

Arnim van Lieshout — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:03:49 +0000

Chris,

Is this swapfile actively used by the vm or just a leftover from the sVmotion?
Check your .vmx file for sched.swap.derivedName= parameter.

Probably the vm is using a new swap file in the new location. If this is the case, the old swapfile can be safely removed.

-Arnim

By: Chris Sprinkle

Chris Sprinkle — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 13:01:48 +0000

I performed an SVmotion on a VM and the swap file was left behind in the old datastore. There were no reported errors. The VM continued to run without an issue. All configurations are to store the swap with the VM.

Anyone have any ideas?