Error events with the description "com.vmware.vcIntegrity.NeedSyncDepots" are seen in the vCenter Events tab in vSphere Client once every 24 hours

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

When monitoring the vCenter events in vSphere Client, once every 24 hours an error event can be seen:

Description	com.vmware.vcIntegrity.NeedSyncDepots
Type	Error
User	com.vmware.vcIntegrity
Event Type ID	com.vmware.vcIntegrity.NeedSyncDepots

 

The event is logged daily at the same time

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 8.0.x

Cause

These events do not indicate any real issue.

The vCenter Service (VPXD) has a scheduled task that is being run once every 24 hours, which triggers a sync between the local patch repository in vCenter Lifecycle Manager (VLCM) and the download sources configured in VLCM.
Once this task has been started, VLCM gets notified about it, identifies it as one of its own tasks, and logs a "NeedSyncDepots" event.

The severity information for the event is supposed to be taken from the language-specific localization files stored in the vCenter Server Appliance, together with a full-text description of the event.

The localization files are however missing an entry for this specific event, therefore the default severity is applied, which is "Error". This results in these events being shown as an "Error" event with the internal event type ID "com.vmware.vcIntegrity.NeedSyncDepots" being used as description, instead of the correct classification "Information" with a correct text description the language used for vSphere Client.

Resolution

These messages are not actual errors, but of informational nature only.
As long as the actual patch sync completes successfully, evident by a Task in the vCenter Tasks tab, "Download patch definitions" finishing around the same time with the status "Completed", the "com.vmware.vcIntegrity.NeedSyncDepots" are benign and can be ignored.

There is currently no workaround to change the event type to "Information" though.

Broadcom engineering is aware of this issue and working on a fix to be released in a future vCenter version.

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