Bug Alert: Powering On VM in VMware vCenter stucks at 66%

Today I had a strange issue in my vCenter, after a maintenance operation on my server I wanted to power on several VMs and I noticed that they got stuck at 66% in the power on process. There are no warnings or errors. Some VMs take up to 60 minutes to power on and some remain at 66%.

Officially, I could not find a KB article about this, but after some research, I came to the conclusion that it is a bug in VMware vCenter 8 U2 with the 22617221 build. To fix this temporary bug:

VMware vService Manager must be restarted in the VAMI interface or via esxcli for the VMs to start as usual. vService Manager allows you to manage the set of vServices that extensions provide and to configure virtual machines and vApps to be dependent on these vServices. You access vService Manager from vCenter Server Extensions. You can add dependencies on vServices to virtual machines and vApps directly in the vSphere Web Client, see https://developer.vmware.com/docs/11686/GUID-8DFADDF4-C082-4075-8D97-B8AFAD62ED91.html .

service-control --stop vmware-vsm
service-control --start vmware-vsm

No sooner said than done, once the service is restarted, all VMs are up and running quickly as usual.

And this is it from this short blog post, if you have any questions, please use the comment section below! 🙂