No Host is Compatible with Virtual Machine ESXi 5.5

Recently, while upgrading ESXi 5.0 Update 2 to ESXi 5.5, faced an issue that several virtual machines were not able to be vMotioned to any ESXi 5.5 servers. The error message shown on the vSphere client task pane was:

No host is compatible with the virtual machine.

Yes, it looks so obvious that something isn’t compatible with ESXi 5.5 on these virtual machines. Checked the settings on a virtual machine and found that:

• SCSI controller: BusLogic Parallel.
• Operating System: Debian Linux 5 (32-bit)

Odd thing was that the clone of this virtual machine was fine, i.e. one for production and another for test/dev. The settings were exactly the same. What’s the next step? Of course, vmkernel.log.

vmkernel.log

2014-02-09T23:02:02.970Z cpu6:3550541)P2MCache: 545: vm 4895049: GetPhysMemRange failed for PPN 0x1c9af4 canBlock 1 count 98 status Out of slots

2014-02-09T23:02:02.970Z cpu6:3550541)VmMemCow: 1599: p2m update: cannot reserve – cur 2309 2432 rsvd 0 req 1 avail 2432

2014-02-09T23:02:02.970Z cpu6:3550541)P2MCache: 545: vm 4895049: GetPhysMemRange failed for PPN 0x18bff5 canBlock 1 count 99 status Out of slots

2014-02-09T23:02:02.970Z cpu6:3550541)VmMemCow: 1599: p2m update: cannot reserve – cur 2309 2432 rsvd 0 req 1 avail 2432

2014-02-09T23:02:02.970Z cpu6:3550541)VmMemCow: 1599: p2m update: cannot reserve – cur 2309 2432 rsvd 0 req 1 avail 2432

2014-02-09T23:02:02.970Z cpu6:3550541)VmMemCow: 1599: p2m update: cannot reserve – cur 2309 2432 rsvd 0 req 1 avail 2432

2014-02-09T23:02:23.480Z cpu9:5982)Config: 346: “SIOControlFlag2” = 1, Old Value: 0, (Status: 0x0)

2014-02-09T23:03:53.550Z cpu4:12576)Config: 346: “SIOControlFlag2” = 0, Old Value: 1, (Status: 0x0)

Looking at the vmkernel.log, I could see that reserving memory was causing an issue. To fix the problem, I did the following:

1. Remove memory reservation
2. Storage vMotion only the configuration file to another VMFS volume
3. vMotion
4. Storage vMotion back the configuration file to the original VMFS volume
5. Create memory reservation

After upgrading to ESXi 5.5 and see the error above, don’t panic. It can be simply fixed with vMotion and storage vMotion.