A general system error occurred: Launch failure

Failure to Launch

Sound the Alarm! Sound the Alarm!

*ARRRRRRREEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
ARRRRRRREEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

and one heck of a day sweating bullets, am-I-right?!

Also sorry about the lack of updates, with spring and work, it’s been hard to find time to blog. Deepest apologies.

The Story

Well it’s Tuesday so it’s clearly a day for a story, and boy do I have a story for you. I was going about my usual way of working.. endlessly to meet my goal… that never able to acquire goal of perfection…. anyway… I had completed a couple major tasks of going from vCenter 5.5 to 6.5u2, and while I have yet to blog about that fun bag (cause I had used my own PKI and certificates so the migration scripts VMware provides pooped the bed till I replaced them with self signed) but I digress this has nothing to do with that… well sort of.

Where was I… oh right… I was vMotioning a couple VMs to some new 6.5U2 hosts I had setup on new hardware (yeah buddy this was a whole new world (Why did I just say that in the voice of Princess Jasmine?)) but alas the final VM was not meant to move for it had stalled @ 20 percent (I had this happen once before during my deployment and discovered some interesting things about multi-NIC vmotions) I probably should blog about that toooooo but alas my time is running short. (I still have many other things to tackle and blog about). and then……..

“A general system error occurred: Launch failure”

ugh…. I could have jumped right to the logs but I jumped on google instead…

CloudSpark apparently recently came across this issue and posted on all the many places he apparently could think… reddit, and VMware forums

the VMware post got a tad long, but it was more the post on reddit that got me wondering….

“Haven’t seen this personally, but there’s a few things via google on the “Failed to connect to peer process” error that suggest it could be due to running out of storage. Specifically in one scenario, the /tmp/vmware-root folder on the ESXi host fills up with logs.” – Astat1ne

When I SSH into the host and ran “df -h” I was surprised to be reported back with an error:

esxcli returned an error: 1

Something to that extent anyway. I ended up Moving all the VMs back off the host, and swapped out the SD card the ESXi software was installed on (I had a copy of the SD card with a clone of the ESXi software and host configure that was created right after the host was installed and configured).

Sure enough after reboot powering it back on, “df -h” returned clean. I was then able to vMotion all the VMs back onto the set of new hosts.

Def a generic error message I’ve never seen, and thinking about it now is rather comical. (I know when your in the middle of the problem it’s not so funny)…

BUT it sure is now! :D…. this is so going to come back to bite me….

(await updates here post April 30th)