“No guest OS heartbeats” when attempting vMotion

When attempting to vMotion a couple of my virtual machines I received the “No guest OS heartbeats” error with many of them. Googling resulted in a number of possible reasons like

• ensure that the VMware Tools are installed in the virtual machine before performing a migration
• ensure that the virtual machine has been running long enough for the operating system to be completely started before performing a migration
• if VMware Tools are already installed, reinstall the VMware Tools to ensure that you are on the latest version and that there is no corruption in the configuration

but I just could not beleave this was going on all my VMs.

Then I found out this was related to a recent reboot of my vCenter server and there are a number of fixes:

1. Just ignore the warning, vMotion will run just fine and the warning behavior will disappear at some point
2. Quickly open the console view of the virtual machine
3. Restart the vmware tools services process(could be scripted if you have many)

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