Failed to move a VM out of maintenance mode candidate host since the VM is in manual mode!

The vSphere 7 to 8 upgrade (and soon to vSphere 9) series continues successfully, this time I had the above-mentioned challenge during the Check Compliance or Run Pre-Check State inside Image Based Patching.

The error message says that there are VMs that cannot be migrated Fully Automated, which is very useful in the context of Image Based Patching. You want to use the luxury of clicking on Remediate All and the hosts update themselves bit by bit. However, the customer has set his DRS settings to Fully Automated, so the source of the error lies elsewhere.

In the next step I checked the settings at cluster level, here I noticed under VM Overrides that various (22) VMs in the DRS context were switched to manual.

After consulting with the customer, we changed the setting of all VMs from ‘Manual‘ to ‘Fully Automated‘, at least for the upgrade phase. Lo and behold, the pre-run check worked perfectly and the upgrade to vSphere 8 was flawless.

That’s it from this short but important post, if you have any question use the comment section below. 🙂