Thursday, March 14, 2013

vMotion error at 63% due to CBT file lock

A number of times in the past couple of years, we've had issues with vMotion on ESX 4.1 which happened after storage/SAN breakdowns/issues. ESX doesn't handle losing its storage very well and this can create locks on the VMs that can only be fix by rebooting the host (and shutting the hung VMs down first).

However, the other day I experienced the same sort of error on a ESXi 5.0 cluster which had not had any storage issues. This is quite inconvenient when you can't put a host into maintenance mode.

When initiating a vMotion, the VM fails at 63% with the following error:

"The VM failed to resume on the destination during early power on. 
Reason: Could not open/create change tracking file.
Cannot open the disk '/vmfs/volumes/xxxxxx/vmname.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on"

It should be mentioned that for this customer we use Symantec Netbackup 7.5 with agentless .vmdk backup. To speed up the backup process we have enabled Changed Block Tracking (CBT) on the VMs.

I found this KB article but it only related to ESX 4.0 and 4.1 and also the suggestion is to just disable CBT which is not an option.

After a talk with VMware Support, we found the error.

It turns out that there is a lock on one or more of the .ctk files which are the files that keep track of changes to the .vmdks. These ctk files are created automatically when CBT is enabled. If one or more of these files are deleted, they will be recreated automatically.
In a normal setup, the .ctk files will only be locked for a few seconds when the backup software accesses the file.

The error looks like this:



To fix it, do the following:

Putty to one of the ESX hosts (remember to enable SSH under security profiles first).
Cd to the directory of the .vmx file

List all the .ctk files:

#ls -al | grep ctk

For each ctk file, verify whether the file has a lock

#vmkfstools -D vmname-ctk.vmdk

look for "mode" in the output. If it is "mode 0" your fine. If "mode 1" there's a lock. For "mode 2" something is completely wrong...


If you find a lock on a file, create a tmp directory and move the ctk file there (do this for all ctk's with locks):

#mkdir tmp

#mv vmname-ctk tmp

This will also work when the VM is powered on.

And you're done. After this, the VM will vMotion without failing.

This has been tested and works both on a ESX 4.1 classic cluster (where I had the same issue) and ESXi 5.

The VMware engineer could not give me an exact root cause but he was fairly sure that it was related to the backup software and that something had gone wrong while this software has been accessing these files.

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