VMware : Reconfigure virtual machine status is stuck “In progress”

By | February 18, 2016

If you just have reconfigured your virtual machine hardware in vCenter and can see that the status is stuck at “In progress…” for a while (much longer than usual, even though waiting 30 minutes for something that should normally take 5 seconds), then you may be facing the bug I have seen in vCenter version 6.

To “fix” this issue and being able to start your VM again, try the following steps :

1. Restart the vCenter service (on the vCenter server itself, go to “services.msc”).

The pending task notification will disappear, however the change you have done will likely not be applied (you may start your VM as is or do the next steps if you want to modify the virtual hardware again).

2. Try to modify the virtual hardware again (you will probably get the following message) :

Reconfigure virtual machine
Another task is already in progress.

This is because the vCenter have cleared the pending task but the hypervisor running that VM still have this task running (stuck). Follow the next step to fix that problem…

3. Enable SSH on the hypervisor that run this VM, login and restart the management agents using the following commands :

/etc/init.d/hostd restart
/etc/init.d/vpxa restart

NOTE : You may see the hypervisor disconnect from vCenter and receive alerts… this is expected, the VMs running on this HV should not be impacted.

At this point, you should be able to modify the virtual hardware and start the VM. However, reproducing this problem in a lab environment gave me another error :

Reconfigure virtual machine

Cannot complete operation due to concurrent modification by
another operation.

Well, that was unexpected! I succeed getting rid of it by starting the VM as is, stop it, modify the virtual hardware and then start it again.