vCenter Server Appliance email notifications are not sent when multiple email addresses are defined in an alarm action

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

 

• Alarm Actions are set to send an email notification to multiple email addresses using the semicolon (;) delimiter.
• You see this alarm error:
  
  Alarm 'nameofalarm' on <vCenterServerFQDN> cannot send email to <emailaddress1>;<emailaddress2>;
   
• In the /var/mail/root logs, you see entries similar to:
   

  Final-Recipient: RFC822; <contact1>@<domainname>;<contact2@<domainname>;
  X-Actual-Recipient: rfc822; “553 Invalid route address”@<vcsaname>.<domainname>
  Action: failed
  Status: 5.1.3

Environment

VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.5.x
VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5.x
VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.1.x
VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.0.x
VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.0.x

Cause

• VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 only accepts comma (,)

Resolution

This is a known issue affecting vCenter Server Appliance.

https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2150106    Unable to send a notification email from Alarm action if multiple emails are separated by semicolon in VCSA 6.5

•     VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 only accepts comma (,)

Use comma (,) , and not semicolon (;) to seperate the multiple email addresses in your alarm action.

Workaround:

1. Create multiple email notification actions for each email address.
2. Utilize an email distribution group to send email notifications.