I was doing my daily round on the VMTN Forums and noticed this topic on VMs flickering between ESX hosts. I’ve personally never witnessed this and didn’t even knew it was a known issue. Luckily Troy Clavell pointed the topic starter out to a KB article related to this exact issue. Apparently it’s being caused by the fact that the VM is registered on two hosts at the same time.
Symptoms:
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After one of the following, a Virtual Machine appears as being registered on two ESX Servers:
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A VMotion fails to complete correctly or times out in VirtualCenter
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A DRS issue where virtual machines are VMotioned automatically in quick succession
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When a machine is powered on during VMware HA failover.
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The Service Console on an ESX host is low on memory starving the vpxa process
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In VirtualCenter, you see the virtual machine as appearing on one ESX Server for a few seconds, then it seems to be on the other.
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The virtual machine may appear to jump back and forth among different ESX hosts.
I’m not going to copy/paste the solution cause the KB article will probably change over time, but it’s most definitely worth looking into… it does sound like something that can happen to all of us.