Intermittent failure when generating vCenter support bundle: "Error in creating tar file" and "unexpected end of data"

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

The generation of the vCenter Server support bundle intermittently fails.

In the backtrace, you see logs similar to:

INFO:vmware.appliance.supportbundle.supportbundle_helper:Task : Support Bundle task failed.
ERROR:vmware.appliance.supportbundle.supportbundle_helper:Failed : 874 CRITICAL vmtar.py:341
[tarVmtar] /storage/log/vmware/vpxd-svcs/authz-ldapdump.ldif
^[[31mException^[[0m "unexpected end of data"
ERROR vc-support:34 /usr/bin/vc-support encountered an exception: Error in creating tar file: /storage/log/vc-support.tgz
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/vc-support", line 29, in <module>
    sys.exit(main(sys.argv[1:]))
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/lib/vmware/site-packages/supportbundle/cli/vcsupport.py", line 60, in main
    run(options)
  File "/usr/lib/vmware/site-packages/supportbundle/main.py", line 644, in run
    tarObj.close()
  File "/usr/lib/vmware/site-packages/supportbundle/vmtar.py", line 670, in close
    raise ActionException("Error in creating tar file: %s" % self.getFilePath())
supportbundle.action.ActionException: Error in creating tar file: /storage/log/VCFQDN-YYYY-MM-DD--.tgz

 

In the backtrace logs, you observe an "unexpected end of data" exception during tar creation, followed by an ActionException.

 

Environment

VCF 9.1

Cause

This issue is caused by a rare race condition between read and write tasks during the tar file creation process while generating the vCenter support bundle.

Resolution

Retry the support bundle generation process. Subsequent attempts to generate the vCenter support bundle will typically succeed without issue.