Fixing vCenter Error: “Another task is already in progress”

I came across an odd issue for the first time in my lab. A Veeam backup failed to complete with one VM reporting the following- Error: Another task is already in progress

With retries producing the same warning it was time for more meaningful debugging. Upon logging into vCenter I could already see stacks of recent tasks failing with the same error. I found the VM in question then tried to put the host it resided on into maintenance mode, forcing a compute vMotion. All VMs migrated successfully except the problem child. Time for a quick fix- I’ll just restart the guest OS.

Nope.

A bit more digging revealed that in certain cases, tasks may timeout in vCenter, continue to run on the host but fail to complete. The fix is a simple restart of management services.

SSH to the host with problem VM(s), then run the following-

/etc/init.d/hostd restart && /etc/init.d/vpxa restart

No downtime, no host restarts, no problem.

19 Comments

  1. Thanks so much Jonny, was able to cancel my Veeam ticket I had opened for 2 days waiting for a response. Worked perfect!

  2. I did not work for me. It is showing this:
    [root@XXXXXX:~] /etc/init.d/hostd restart && /etc/init.d/vpxa restart
    watchdog-hostd: Terminating watchdog process with PID 72138
    hostd stopped.
    hostd started.
    watchdog-vpxa: Terminating watchdog process with PID 72186
    vpxa stopped.

    Should I see vpxa “started”?

    1. Vpxa should show as started. If it starts successfully but instantly crashes you have another issue. Tail hostd logs while attempting to start vpxa and take it from there.

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