It’s a normal day of making configuration changes to our ESXi hosts. As I’m making my way down the the line hosts, I find a single host that will not complete the entering maintenance mode task. Upon further investigation, I see that it’s a single VM holding up the process. Under “Tasks”, it says “The operation is not allowed in the current state”. Exactly what state is that?

I’ve seen this before, where for whatever reason a VM will refuse to migrate on its own. Cancel the maintenance mode task, manually migrate the VM, and retry. Well, no dice. The “Events” page is really no help. One of the possible causes is “if vMotion IPs are not configured correctly, the operation will fail”. I just migrated 46 other VM’s, so I don’t think that’s the issue.

A quick Google search brought me to the VMware KB for vMotion Troubleshooting, but unfortunately this did not provide much assistance. I really don’t want to contact the customer for a window to reboot. Instead, let’s try restarting the hostd service. From the command line of the affected host, run the following command:

/etc/init.d/hostd restart

As soon as the service restarts, I am successfully able to put the host into maintenance mode. There is no need to restart the vpxa or all of the management agents!