Scan for Update, Check Compliance and remediate task failed with ascii codec error

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• vSphere Web Client > Hosts and Clusters > Host > Update Managers > Scan for Updates fails.
• Check Compliance and Remediate with a baseline will fail.
• Similar error is shown in /var/log/vua.log

20XX-XX-XXTXX:XX:XX.XXXZ info vua[2116798] [Originator@6876 sub=VUA] Command '/tmp/vuaScript-mDCyYP/precheck.py --ip=XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX' finished with exit status 1
--> stderr: --------
--> Traceback (most recent call last):
-->   File "/build/mts/release/bora-13006603/bora/build/esx/release/vmvisor/sys-boot/lib64/python3.5/subprocess.py", line 385, in run
-->   File "/build/mts/release/bora-13006603/bora/build/esx/release/vmvisor/sys-boot/lib64/python3.5/subprocess.py", line 790, in communicate
-->   File "/build/mts/release/bora-13006603/bora/build/esx/release/vmvisor/sys-boot/lib64/python3.5/encodings/ascii.py", line 26, in decode
--> UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe4 in position 94357: ordinal not in range(128)
-->
--> During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
-->
--> Traceback (most recent call last):
-->   File "/tmp/vuaScript-mDCyYP/precheck.py", line 2267, in <module>
-->     sys.exit(main(sys.argv))
-->   File "/tmp/vuaScript-mDCyYP/precheck.py", line 2227, in main
-->     init(product, version)
-->   File "/tmp/vuaScript-mDCyYP/precheck.py", line 1994, in init
-->     systemProbe = SystemProbeESXi(version)
-->   File "/tmp/vuaScript-mDCyYP/precheck.py", line 586, in __init__
-->     self.esxnwinfo = getoutput("/usr/sbin/esxcfg-info -n -F xml")
-->   File "/build/mts/release/bora-13006603/bora/build/esx/release/vmvisor/sys-boot/lib64/python3.5/subprocess.py", line 514, in getoutput
-->   File "/build/mts/release/bora-13006603/bora/build/esx/release/vmvisor/sys-boot/lib64/python3.5/subprocess.py", line 495, in getstatusoutput
-->   File "/build/mts/release/bora-13006603/bora/build/esx/release/vmvisor/sys-boot/lib64/python3.5/subprocess.py", line 316, in check_output
-->   File "/build/mts/release/bora-13006603/bora/build/esx/release/vmvisor/sys-boot/lib64/python3.5/subprocess.py", line 392, in run
-->   File "/build/mts/release/bora-13006603/bora/build/esx/release/vmvisor/sys-boot/lib64/python3.5/subprocess.py", line 1528, in kill
-->   File "/build/mts/release/bora-13006603/bora/build/esx/release/vmvisor/sys-boot/lib64/python3.5/subprocess.py", line 1518, in send_signal
--> ProcessLookupError: [Errno 3] No such process
-->
--> --------
-->
20XX-XX-XXTXX:XX:XX.XXXZ info vua[2116798] [Originator@6876 sub=VUA] Invoking: "/bin/rm -rf /tmp/vuaScript-mDCyYP"

Note: The preceding log excerpts are only examples. Date, time, and environmental variables may vary depending on your environment.

Cause

This issue occurs when vSwitch's port group name is configured in non-ASCII.

By design, non-ASCII character is not recognized in inner ESXi operation, like Scan for Update, Check Compliance and Remediate task by Update Manager.

Resolution

To resolve this issue re-configure port group name in ASCII character.