Iofiltervpd service on ESXi hosts crashes after Nessus scans against the host

Products

• VMware Cloud Foundation
• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
In the vCenter vSphere UI, we see the following error:

A general system error occurred: PBM error occurred during PreCloneCheckCommonCallback: Fault cause: pbm.fault.PBMFault ; No VASA Provider for schema namespace (vmwarevmcrypt) found.

Similar errors are generated when cloning and editing VMs.

SDDC Manager prechecks for ESXi hosts fails in a VCF Environment.

Environment

VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.3
VMware Cloud Foundation 4.x

Cause

This has been isolated to an issue in ESXi 7.0U3.

Due to a security scan by a third party utility such as Nessus, the mechanism of the scan causes an expected crash of the iofiltervpd service on ESXi.

Resolution

This has been resolved in ESXi 7.0 U3k Build 21313628 and above.

 

 

Workaround:
1. SSH into each affected ESXi host in the cluster.
2. Restart the iofilter service using the command: 

/etc/init.d/iofiltervpd restart 

3. SSH into the vCenter Server and restart the SPS service on the vCenter with the following command: 

vmon-cli -r sps