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

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

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

• 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 6.x

Cause

VMware vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.x only accepts comma (,) to separate email addresses.

Resolution

Email addresses need to be seperated by a comma (,).

For more information,
Unable to send a notification email from Alarm action if multiple emails are separated by semicolon

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

To workaround,

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