Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Cancel a vMotion Task

Normally, VMware do not allow you to cancel an on-going vMotion task (I am not talking about Storage vMotion). On the web, there are some recommendations like restarting vmware-mgmt or restarting the vCenter service. I can say restarting vmware-mgmt (vpxa) never helps. Restarting vCenter service (vpxd) is too costly. A possible idea is creating an environment that force the vMotion task timeout by itself which is max. 15 minutes. The easiest way is to uncheck vMotion function checkbox on the destination hosts' network and such that vMotion traffic would be stucked on the network and failed by timeout. I think this cost is much lower then restarting the whole vCenter while your vCenter is managing thousands of hosts or a lot of backup software is depending on it. Backup software do not affected by vMotion network is down (yes, you should separate management network and vMotion network as a best practice.)