A general system error occurred : vix error code = (1,32), during IP customization of Linux VMs using SRM or vLSR

Products

• VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.x
• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms

Test Recovery, Planned Migration or Disaster Recovery fails during IP customization

• Error on the Recovery Plan Report in the DR UI:

A general system error occurred : vix error code = (1,32)

 

• /var/log/vmware/vmware-dr.log will have the below entries for the failure:

-->    msg = "Received SOAP response fault from [<SSL(<io_obj p:0x00007f31740cf878, h:58, <TCP '172.22.66.70 : 48098'>, <TCP '172.22.66.66 : 443'>>), /sdk>]: createTemporaryDirectory
--> A general system error occurred: vix error codes = (1, 0).

Environment

VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.8

VMware Live Site Recovery 9.x

open-vm-tools 12.3.0 or greater upgraded with the Guest OS

Linux VMs protected with IP customization

Cause

• The issue occurs due to a parsing failure of SAML Token validation request in 'VGAuthService' running from VMware Tools for Linux (Tar Tools) version 10.3.22 when open-vm-tools version 12.3.5 is running inside the guest.

• /var/log/vmware/vgauth logs of the Guest OS in the recovered VM will have the below indications.
• "vgauth" will start off as expected.
• While reading data on socket, it will encounter the below error:

[2024-12-11T12:13:42.680Z] [   debug] [VGAuthService] ServiceProtoReadAndProcessRequest: read EOF on Connection 1
[2024-12-11T12:13:42.680Z] [ warning] [VGAuthService] ServiceProtoReadAndProcessRequest: g_markup_parse_context_parse() failed: Unexpected element 'hostVerified' in parse state 1

• This can happen when open-vm-tools is installed without properly uninstalling the older VMware Tools for Linux (Tar Tools) or guest OS having VMware Tools for Linux (Tar Tools) installed is upgraded to a newer version supporting vendor provided open-vm-tools package

 

Resolution

On the VM in the protected site, follow the below steps:

• Run the below command to uninstall all traces of  TAR tools:

/usr/bin/vmware-uninstall-tools.pl

• Reboot the VM
• Run the below command to uninstall all traces of Open VMware Tools:

dnf remove open-vm-tools

• Reboot the VM
• Install the latest supported version of VMware Tools

Note: VMware Tools installed should be 12.3.0 or higher for Open VMware Tools, or 10.3.26 or higher for TAR Tools

 

Additional Information

The issue can happen with following combination:

• ESXi version is 8.0.2 or later.
• 'VGAuthService' is running from older versions of VMware Tools for Linux (Tar Tools) than 10.3.26 or open-vm-tools version less than 12.3.0.
• 'vmtoolsd' is running from VMware Tools for Linux (Tar Tools) 10.3.26 or later or open-vm-tools 12.3.0 or later.
• SAML Token authentication method is used for guestOps.