vMotion: A general system error occurred

It’s always nice to have a general error getting thrown in your face. It gives you absolutely no indication as of where something went wrong.

I’ve had this pleasure in the past week. I was just minding my own business moving some VM’s around, when suddenly vCenter said “A general system error occurred” and my VM stayed on the old host as if nobody ever asked him to move.

So I went to the events of the host, to see if there was more information there. And there was, unfortunately not something that I could use. The suggestion was to check de vMotion IP settings and if the hosts where accessible. As migrations had been working the day before, this couldn’t be the problem.

I dove into the logs of the host that holds the VM to see if there was more information to be found. And surely there was. In the /var/log/vobd.log I saw entries stating “[vob.visorfs.ramdisk.full] Cannot extend visorfs file /var/log/jumpstart-native-stdout.log because its ramdisk (var) is full.”.

Well that couldn’t be good, so I opened the console of the host and did a check to see what file or process was eating up all of the space.

The file mentioned in the error “jumpstart-native-stdout.log” was the one that had grown rapidly and filled up the RAM disk. Looking at its content it was clear that there was problem with some vibs in combination with the hardware. Every time VUM checked for updates it produced an error and lines where written to the log file, making it grow every day.

Now there are two solutions to this problem. One is to find and remove/replace the faulty vibs, and the other one is to clean-up the log so there will become space available on the RAM disk. I went for the latter as this host was planned for removal in about a month and this solution was the quickest.

To clean-up the log file you only have to use one commando which will write to the log file and essentially replace everything in the log file with the given string. The commando is:

echo -n "" > /var/log/jumpstart-native-stdout.log

I’m aware that as this is a general error, there are many possible issues that can cause this error, but one of them is the one I described here. So hopefully it helps someone encountering the same problem.

Daniël de Zoete

Started his working life as a system manager at a health care organization. Is now a dedicated technical consultant at PepperByte. Specialist in virtualization and security.

Core qualities
Eager to learn, punctual, fun, loyal, patient

Hobbies
Socializing, watching television series and sports

Job description
Technical Consultant