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Troubleshooting › Virtual Machine Backup and Restore Related › When Restored from a Higher Version of ESXi host to a Lower version ESXi host, VM gets stuck at booting stage

When Restored from a Higher Version of ESXi host to a Lower version ESXi host, VM gets stuck at booting stage

When restored from a higher version of ESXi host to a lower version ESXi host, VM gets stuck at booting stage after it is powered on.

Valid on Windows platforms. Valid for VMware VM only.

Symptom

Restore a VM from a higher version ESXi host to a low version ESXi host, power on the VM. The VM gets stuck at the booting stage.

Solution

The guest OS version of this VM may not be supported by the lower version ESXi. As a workaround, you can use one of the following options:

For example, a Windows Server 2012 R2 VM is backed up from an ESXi 5.5 and restored to ESXi 5.0 update 1. As ESXi 5.0 starts to support Windows Server 2012 R2 guest OS after Update 2, this issue may occur.

You need to upgrade ESXi 5.0 Update 1 to Update 2 so that Windows Server 2012 R2 guest OS is supported. As a workaround, you can change the guest OS version of restored VM to the version that is supported by the current version of ESXi (in above example, change to Windows Sever 2008 R2”).

Note: This workaround may not resolve the issue.