Fails to open a console in vSphere web client of virtual machine whose name contains non-ASCII characters

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• When you open the console of a virtual machine whose name contains non-ASCII characters (etc, the Chinese, Japanese, Korean) from vSphere web client, you will see a black screen with the below message:

      The console has been disconnected. Close this window and re-launch the console to reconnect.

• The console could be opened successfully in VMRC and vSphere Client.
• In the C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\logs\vsphere-client\logs\vsphere_client_virgo.log file, you see entries similar to:

     [YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.Z] [ERROR] http-bio-9443-exec-10 #.#.#.#. [.[localhost].[/vsphere-client].[AuthdAdapter] Servlet.service() for servlet [AuthdAdapter] in context with path [/vsphere-client] threw exception java.lang.RuntimeException: AuthdException: 502 Input not in UTF-8 encoding.
     [YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.Z] [ERROR] http-bio-9443-exec-10 #.#.#.#. [.[localhost].[/vsphere-client].[AuthdAdapter] Servlet.service() for servlet [AuthdAdapter] in context with path [/vsphere-client] threw exception java.lang.RuntimeException: AuthdException: 501 Command 'CONNECT/vmfs/volumes/[Datastore]/##/##.vmx' not authorized for specified VM

 

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 6.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.0.x

Cause

The problem is during Authd handshake. The Socket InputStream is not able to decode UTF-8 properly on CISWIN machines.

Resolution

This is a known issue affecting vCenter Server 6.x

To workaround the issue, JVM needs to be started with "-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8" parameter which will set the right character encoding for non-ASCII.

1. Stop VMware vSphere Web Client service on vCenter server.
2. Backup JVM configuration file located under the path "C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\WebClient\server\wrapper\conf\wrapper.conf"
3. Add below lines in the JVM configuration file of vSphere Web Client

           # Set the default charset
       wrapper.java.additional.*=-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

            Note: The '*' stands for a number. It should be equal to the last number of ‘wrapper.java.additional',parameter in JVM configuration file plus one.  
                      For example, the last number of this parameter is 'wrapper.java.additional.19', the '*' should be 20. So the full parameter is wrapper.java.addtional.20=-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

4. Start VMware vSphere Web Client service.
5. Login vSphere Web Client and try to open console of the virtual machine.

In vCenter 6.5:

1. The command line arguments for vsphere-client is, 

C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\cfg\vmware-vmon\svcCfgfiles\vsphere-client.json

1. Find the line "-classpath", and add "-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8" before it.
2. Start VMware vSphere Web Client service.
3. Login vSphere Web Client and try to open console of the virtual machine.

 

 

Additional Information

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