I have a 2 hosts cluster but when i put one host in maintenance mode its stuck at 2%. No cd rom is attached to any vms. no pending vmtools install. what is the problem?
Take a look at the VMs running on the host - one of the for some reason is not able to vmotion to the other host -
i can vmotion the vms manually without any issues
do you have any DRS rules setup for any VMs?
no rules just the default HA/DRS enabled cluster
no rules. HA/DRS is enabled. I tried changing the admission control policy from 1 host failure to 25% cpu reservation but still does not work
Can you Manually vMotion all the VMs to see which one is causing it to hose up? And try disabling admission control.
i can manually vmotion all he vms of with no issue. disabling admission control does not help. I do have a vshield FW appliance on each host though. Should that matter?
yes vShield appliance can cause trouble with the host to get on maintenance mode. a similar situation is explained in this and the cause seems to match our situation
KB VMware KB: Hosts that run vShield appliances might fail to enter maintenance mode during remediation
so all vms needs to be manually moved if thye have vshield installed?
seems so, we need to migrate the VM's off . The same situation is faced on the below post as well
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/258678?start=0&tstart=0
The VMs you can vMotion Manually should be. The Host is stuck on one of them that may be installing vmtools or have a CD drive attached or isn't on shared storage.
Troy Clavell has a point a DRS rule could be preventing, although I haven't personally seen this issue and am going to test.
Do you have DRS enabled at all on the cluster, and if yes how is it configured?
André
Did you get a chance to check this KB VMware KB: ESX/ESXi host fails to go into maintenance mode
Thanks,