Today we had some issues with some VMs regarding snapshots and some VM operations.

We had upgraded some several ESXi 5.0 hosts to a ESXi 5.5 and put them in a new vCenter 5.5b. Consequently the VMs HW were upgraded to v10.

I don’t know if this snapshots issues was regarding these migrations, but we have seen them after this migrations. In around 200 VMs(50% of them have snapshots) we have find 10/15 with this problems.

1st problem:

When they try to revert to any snapshots we get “The operation is not supported on the object”.
This one was easy to fixed, just remove the VM from the inventory and add again to vCenter. That fix the problem.

We may use the vim-cmd vmsvc/reload vmid option here(second option on this article).

2th problem:

When they try to use any of the Snapshots options(‘Take Snapshot’, ‘Snapshot Manager’ and ‘Revert to current Snapshot’) Virtual machine operations were grayed out. There is virtual machine tasks running in the background(maybe any previous task hanging).

So first we need to check which tasks are running on the VM.

Just connect to your host(ssh) and list all VMs and their vmid.

Run: vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms

You will get all VMs and vmid associated. After you get your VM vmid run:

vim-cmd vmsvc/get.tasklist vmid

The output is similar to:

(ManagedObjectReference) [
‘vim.Task:haTask-112-vim.VirtualMachine.createSnapshot-3887’]

If there is no task running on that virtual machine, you see output:

(ManagedObjectReference) []

But even you don’t see any tasks running, it has a process running(or hanging). So we should reload the vmx file(that will create a new Inventory ID (Vmid) and this should be enough to fix this issue.

Run:

vim-cmd vmsvc/reload vmid

Now the Virtual Machine should be ok and you should have all options available again.

More information here about this commands:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1013003
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2048748

UPDATE: Tested the vim-cmd vmsvc/reload on the first issue, and it works.