ESXi VMware vSphere

VMware vSphere: A general system error occurred: Connection refused When starting Virtual Machines.

I had an issue the other day with starting a VM. It would DRS successfully, however fail with “A general system error occurred: Connection refused”

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Googling tells me that the culprit is the vmware-vpx-workflow service being stopped. I SSHed into my VCSA and sure enough found that the service was indeed stopped.

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So I attempt starting the service, and that failed.

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What the hell? Doing a tail on all the logs in the /var/log/vmware/workflow folder don’t come up with anything. However after re-reading the errors during start I realized…maybe its a disk space issue.

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Sure enough, our log disk was full. I grew the log disk, and ran the autogrow command in VMware to resize the disks in the VCSA, restarted the services and VOLA!

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After updating the disk size, we were all set and I was able to start VMs without issues.

Cameron Joyce is a full stack engineer, having experience with all aspects of on premise datacenter, virtualization, disaster recovery, cybersecurity, and Cloud based *aaS technologies. Cameron Joyce has spent more than a decade working in managed services, and brings that experience to his role as a Sr Presales Engineer. Cameron Joyce now shares solutions to problems and new technology overviews through his blog and youtube channels.

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