Broken pipe (Write failed) errors occur when uploading catalog items to a vSAN datastore in VMware Cloud Director

Products

• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

• Attempting to upload ISOs to a catalog in VMware Cloud Director results in errors similar to the following:
  
  org.apache.http.client.NonRepeatableRequestException: Cannot retry request with a non-repeatable request entity - Broken pipe (Write failed)
  
  
• This error is also seen in the VMware Cloud Director logs:
  
  2026-02-11 20:11:27,029 | ERROR    | storage-fabric-activity-pool-10821 | FutureUtil                     | Future ########-####-####-####-############/media/########-####-####-####-############/########-####-####-####-############/media-########-####-####-####-############.iso failed | requestId=########-####-####-####-############,request=POST https://####.####.###/api/catalog/########-####-####-####-############/action/upload,requestTime=1770840490099,remoteAddress=##.##.##.##:#####,userAgent=...,accept=application/*+xml;version 40.0.0-alpha vcd=########-####-####-####-############,task=########-####-####-####-############ activity=(com.vmware.vcloud.backendbase.management.system.TaskActivity,urn:uuid:########-####-####-####-############) activity=(com.vmware.cl.activities.UploadMediaActivity,urn:uuid:########-####-####-####-############) activity=(com.vmware.ssdc.backend.services.impl.CreateMediaActivity,urn:uuid:########-####-####-####-############) activity=(com.vmware.vcloud.fabric.storage.media.impl.CreateFromImportActivity,urn:uuid:########-####-####-####-############) activity=(com.vmware.vcloud.fabric.storage.copy.impl.UploadDatastoreFilesActivity,urn:uuid:########-####-####-####-############)
com.vmware.ssdc.util.LMException: org.apache.http.client.ClientProtocolException
...
Caused by: java.io.IOException: org.apache.http.client.ClientProtocolException
...
Caused by: org.apache.http.client.ClientProtocolException
...
Caused by: org.apache.http.client.NonRepeatableRequestException: Cannot retry request with a non-repeatable request entity
...
Caused by: java.net.SocketException: Broken pipe (Write failed)
...
  
  
• The destination storage for the media items is a vSAN datastore.
• From the ESX host logs, attempts to upload the media files are failing due to space limitations, as in the following example, but there is sufficient space on the datastore:
  
  2026-02-13T23:11:18.482Z In(166) Hostd[2103602]: [Originator@6876 sub=HTTP server /folder req=############ user=vpxuser:####\####] Got HTTP PUT request for /folder/########-####-####-####-############/media########-####-####-####-############/########-####-####-####-############/media-########-####-####-####-############.iso?dsName=#####
...
2026-02-13T23:11:35.649Z Er(163) Hostd[2103607]: [Originator@6876 sub=HTTP server /folder req=########] Reader or Writer failure: No space left  : /vmfs/volumes/vsan:########-####-####-####-############/########-####-####-####-############/media/########-####-####-####-############/########-####-####-####-############/media-########-####-####-####-############.iso
2026-02-13T23:11:35.678Z In(166) Hostd[2103590]: [Originator@6876 sub=Vimsvc.ha-eventmgr] Event 138641 : Issue detected on ####.####.### in ha-datacenter: BC: 3042: File client_loop: send disconnect: Broken pipe... closed with dirty buffers. Possible data loss.
...

Environment

VMware Cloud Director 10.6.x

Cause

As designed, VMware Cloud Director stores all media files under a single root folder within a datastore. vSAN has different limitations for different types of objects and there is a hard 255GB limit on the namespace that is used for the media files. The vSAN datastore is indicating that there isn't sufficient space to accept the uploaded items due to the namespace capacity limitations.

Resolution

As discussed in the following article, the namespace limit can be increased, but this is not a best practice and should be capped to no more than double the default limit:

Error: "Cannot complete login due to an incorrect user name or password" when uploading a media file to a vSAN backed catalog in VMware Cloud Director

If possible, another storage type or the vSAN file service would be alternate approaches to consider instead.

Additional Information

The QueryDirectoryInfo PowerCLI method can be used to determine the current utilization of the namespace. An example of its usage can be found in the following article:

Using PowerCLI to expand vSAN namespace for files larger than 255 gb