How to increase the timeout for Migration Jobs in System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager

Alvin Morales here, and today I wanted to talk for a moment about how you can control the timeouts for multiple migrations in VMM 2012. In System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager Service Pack 1, we now allow multiple migrations to occur and we can set the maximum number of concurrent jobs in the properties of the host. For example, if we set the migration value to 2 then the third job (and fourth job, etc.) will be queued so that there are never more than 2 migration jobs running at the same time. By default a queued job will wait 15 minutes for the other jobs to complete before it times out and fails the job. If the job times out and fails then you will see errors similar to the following in the VMM Admin Console:

Error (23007)

Migration timeout because: VMM cannot complete the host operation on the <machineFQDN> server because of the error: Storage migration for <VMName> was not finished because maximum storage migration limit '2' was reached, please wait for completion of an ongoing migration operation (Virtual machine ID 2425AE00-994F-40D7-A69B-1D1F9BAB9783).

Resolve the host issue and then try the operation again.

A VMM Trace will show events similar to this:

00005365 9.20626545 [388] 0184.0008::06/24-23:57:57.717#04VirVMTask.cs(211): GetFinalResult, got error: 32768 => [Storage migration for 'VMName' was not finished because maximum storage migration limit '2' was reached, please wait for completion of an ongoing migration operation (Virtual machine ID 29FF9E76-1475-48B9-893E-2F98705B3735).]
00005366 9.20648384 [388] 0184.0008::06/24-23:57:57.717#16DeployVmSubtask.cs(10151): Win8 live migration failed with error

00005367 9.20675373 [388] 0184.0008::06/24-23:57:57.717#16DeployVmSubtask.cs(10151): Microsoft.Carmine.WSManWrappers.WSManException: VMM cannot complete the host operation on the <machineFQDN> server because of the error: Storage migration for 'VMName' was not finished because maximum storage migration limit '2' was reached, please wait for completion of an ongoing migration operation (Virtual machine ID 29FF9E76-1475-48B9-893E-2F98705B3735).

Fortunately for us, the timeout value can be increased so that each job will wait longer before failing. To increase the timeout between jobs, follow the steps below:

1. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Server\Settings

2. Create a new DWORD value

3. Set the name to be LiveMigrationQueueTimeoutSecs

4. Set the value to be 00000708 HEX. This will set the Timeout to 30 minutes and is a good place to start. 

5. Restart the VMM service

That should do the trick but you may need to experiment with this value to find the right one for your environment.

Alvin Morales| Senior Support Escalation Engineer | Management and Security Division

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