VMware Virtual Machine Storage vMotion Failed Due To A PBM Error

Storage vMotion is a feature used to change the Virtual Machine Location without a down time and this PBM Error occurred while I was trying to Storage vMotion one of my Virtual Machines. I tried with a different Virtual Machine and it was not possible and, I was realized none of the Virtual Machines were not possible to perform the Storage vMotion and SDRS recommendations were failing.

Manual Storage vMotion wizard had a SDRS Faults error message at the “Ready to complete” stage as below.

Once I clicked on the error message, it displayed the full error message as below

I was found that this was due to the service failure of the “vmware-sps” service. I checked the service status, started and restarted with the below commands

#Check Service Status
service vmware-sps status 

#Start the Service 
service vmware-sps start

#Re-start the service 
service vmware-sps restart

Service status was masked and inactive (dead)

If you need to check all the list unit files and the status use below command, but this for your information purpose only and it’s nothing to do with the fix here

systemctl list-unit-files | grep vmware

Here is the similar output

Simple service starts or restart doesn’t work here and I unmasked and removed the symlink of the service and tried to start the service. Unfortunately, service start or restart didn’t work as I expected.

Here is the command to unmask and remove the symlink of the service

systemctl unmask vmware-sps

Here is the output of my attempts

Finally, I performed the service control start and it started all my services and my vmware-sps service started to run

Here is the command

service-control --start 

Here is the output of my command

I hope this article is helpful for someone having the similar issues with the SDRS and Storage vMotion.