vMotion error: Virtual machine must be running in order to be migrated

Today I wanted to Storage vMotion a VM to a new datastore. But for the first time I got a general error message:

followed up by a general system error message:

I got the same message when I tried to start a “normal” vMotion. So I start to troubleshoot this error. First I looked at the vmware.log of the VM. Nothing unusual in there. So the next stop was the VMkernel. But there was nothing unusual in it too. So I used the good old Microsoft like fix to restart the VMware services at the Service Console using the following command:

service mgmt-vmware restart

after a minute or so I was able to start a vMotion again and after the vMotion completed I started the storage vMotion I was planning to do and this worked like a charm again.

To recap. Sometimes you need to restart the mgmt-vmware to fix the connection between the vSphere host and vCenter.