When installing iofilters on a new or upgraded 7.0 u2 host within a vLCM managed cluster, the host may fail to install all of them, becoming unresponsive in the process

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Host becomes unresponsive with the following message

PMAN raise exception during pre-check as 'com.vmware.esx.task.exec.error<Failed to start the task. Please ensure the system has enough resources and retry'

• You see entries in the ESXi host logs from settingsd, similar to:

------------------------
2020-12-15T18:55:24.290Z settingsd[1001394860]: Util: Failed to ForkExec(/usr/bin/python ++group=settingsd-task-forks,mem=250,stats /usr/lib/vmware/lifecycle/bin/imagemanagerctl.py software --scan --software-spec /var/run/lifecycle.scan.swspec --depot http://host.example.com:9084/vum/repository/hostupdate/__micro-depot__vendor-vmw__metadata-5__index__.xml --task-id ########-####-####-####-##########18): No space left on device
2020-12-15T18:55:24.290Z settingsd[1001394860]: [RunTask]: Failed to exec command for task ########-####-####-####-##########18: ForkExec syscall failed: No space left on device, 0 retries left

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.0

Cause

Host runs out of memory due to incorrect configuration and ends up being in an unresponsive state.

Resolution

To resolve this issue permanently, contact the IO Filter provider and ask them to rebuild their IO filter with the VMware provided patch for the IO Filter SDK. 

To work around the issue temporarily, see the workaround section.

Workaround:
Restart the host to get it back into normal operational state.