Putting a host in maintenance mode hangs at 2%

When putting a host into maintenance mode, it happens that the progress hangs, or times out, at 2% and then nothing further happens. VMotion is not commenced for any of the VM's.


There are a number of things, that should be in place before automatic evacuation of VM's will work.

• DRS should be set to "Fully automated"
• If HA is enabled and only two hosts in the cluster, then the "Allow VM's to be powered on even if they violate availability constraints" option should be checked (see screendump below)
• All CD's on the VM's must be disconnected. Eric Sloof from ntpro.nl has made a cool application, vmcdconnected, where a given host can be scanned and all CD's can be disconnected with one click (see screendump below). After scan, all the VM's with a '+' in front of it has a CD-rom connected.