ESXi Host Remediation Fails with secureMount Status 255 in vSphere Lifecycle Manager

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

When performing remediation or staging tasks via vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM), ESXi hosts may fail with an "An internal error occurred while staging/remediating the host" message. This article provides instructions to troubleshoot and resolve this issue caused by resource limitations during patch processing.

• Remediation or staging fails with: An internal error occurred while staging/remediating the host
• /var/run/log/lifecycle.log contains: Unexpected error occurred while attempting to run Quick Patch scan scripts: secureMount returns status 255
• /var/log/vmkernel.log contains: Admission failure in path: host/vim/vmvisor/settingsd-task-forks

Environment

• VMware ESXi 8.0.3 and later
• vCenter Server 8.0.x / 9.0.x
• vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM)

Cause

The settingsd-task-forks resource group on the ESXi host has insufficient memory configured to handle the execution of Python-based remediation tasks and certificate validation scripts. The default memory allocation is often insufficient for the metadata complexity involved in recent ESXi 8.0.3 patches.

Resolution

Increase the memory allocation for the settingsd-task-forks resource group. This change does not require a host reboot and can be applied during operations.

1. Connect to the affected ESXi host using SSH.
2. Run the following command to increase the memory limit to 450 MB: localcli --plugin-dir=/usr/lib/vmware/esxcli/int sched group setmemconfig -g host/vim/vmvisor/settingsd-task-forks -m 450 -i 0 -l -1 -u mb
3. Attempt the patch staging or remediation again in vCenter.
4. If the failure persists, incrementally increase the memory limit (e.g., 500 MB) by repeating Step 2 with an updated -m value.
5. Once the remediation is successful, retain this setting to prevent the issue from recurring during future compliance scans.

Additional Information

If you continue to experience issues after adjusting the memory limit, please collect a support bundle from the host and vCenter Server for further analysis.

For information on how to collect logs, see Collecting diagnostic information for VMware ESXi.

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