Answer virtual machine question?

Here's a quick brief about my lab.

Physical ESXi 5.1 box runs a vCenter VM, a DC, 3x vESXi 5.1 VM's and a vMA VM. A Starwind iSCSI SAN sitting on the vCenter VM provides shared storage to the vESXi VM's.

So I had all these VM's running. Wanted to see how VM's and hosts behaved in the absence of vCenter. Powered up 2 VM's on one of the vESXi hosts. Shutdown the vCenter VM, waited for it to fully shutdown and lose the vSphere client connection to vCenter. Then powered off the vESXi server hosting those 2 VM's. Waited to see which other vESXi server powered on the VM's. After waiting for like 5 minutes, one of the vESXi hosts began to show some activity and registered the two VM's. Here's a screenshot of what happened. Now I understand most of the messages I got in the Recent Tasks pane, but what's the "Answer virtual machine question" ?

Thanks!

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Comments

blargoe

Were the VMs copies of each other such that you received a prompt where you had to answer "I copied it" or "I moved it" when you powered them on?

Essendon

Hey thanks for the reply blargoe. No, I didnt receive any prompts when the VM's were powered up. I created them from a template a while ago. I googled the messages and nothing meaningful really showed up.

blargoe

That "answer virtual machine question" is pretty generic, usually I have seen it when powering on a VM that was copied, but could have occurred any time you are prompted for input. You typically would see this prompt when open the console of the VM. I haven't seen that task show up without it being something that I had to provide input for. Maybe check the Events for that specific VM and see if you can find any clues

changlinn

That question can be a whole host of things, try a manual vmotion and you will get the question in your vsphere client to see what it is, it could be the physical CD-rom is attached or unshared networking or something similar. Basically a question that needs answering.

jibbajabba

Go to the event tab of the vm in question (you can see it is even a hyperlink in the tasks) and there you can 'usually' see more details (sometimes you have to hit 'more' for the full details)