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How To Fix Hyper-V Migration Attempt Failed

· 3 min

If you are running Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V and have a SAN available, Hyper-V Live migration is a great way to make your Virtual Machines highly available. There is nothing like being able to migrate your VM’s to another node in the cluster and shutdown a host to perform maintenance - I still get excited every time I live migrate a machine!

In some cases though, your Live Migration attempt may fail. Unfortunately the Failover Cluster Manager nor the event viewer sheds much light on the reason in most cases.

Failed Hyper-V Migration Attempt

Failed Hyper-V Migration Attempt

Failed Migration Event Logs

Failed Migration Event Logs

To troubleshoot a problem with virtual no error message is difficult, and my process was to do a Google on the event log error and try my luck with the different forum posts from the TechNet Forums and other such sites. For this reason I decided to make a checklist to go through to try and work out the reason behind the failed live migration. Good luck!

The ‘None Of My Hyper-V Servers Are Live Migrating’ Checklist#

The ‘Migration Attempt Failed but other VM’s migrate fine’ Checklist#

These step is meant for people that are having a single Virtual Machine failing to Live Migrate for example; VM1 and VM2 are hosted on NODE1. VM1 is successfully Live Migrated to NODE2 but VM2 says Migration Attempt Failed.

Weird Notes in the Notes Field

Weird Notes in the Notes Field

Hopefully using these checklists assists you in fixing your Hyper-V Live Migration problems. I will endeavour to update this list as I discover more reasons that Live Migration might fail.