Cannot create Storage Profiles in vCenter 5.5

Yesterday Henrik Andersson and I discovered a strange problem. The following screenshot shows the problem we saw in our demo environment. To be clear, this error showed up as soon as we clicked Create new VM Storage Policy.
storage_profile_01

com.vmware.vim.binding.vmodl.fault.SystemError:
reason = PbmExtendedElementDescription required property summary not set
inherited from com.vmware.vim.binding.vmodl.fault.SystemError: Failed to serialize response

We went trough the troubleshooting process and found the one or other hint which can lead to the problem.
One of the hints was that when using Tags or Tags categories with no description you can encounter this problem. We had 4 Tags in our environment and after entering a description for all 4 the problem was gone.
To be sure that this was the solution I tested it also in my home lab. I created 1 Tag with a category and started the Create new VM Storage Policy wizard.
To my regret the error didn’t show up. So what’s the different between my home lab and the demo lab. They are different in ESX build version, enabled features (demo lab has VSAN enabled) etc.
We tried to delete all existing Tags and recreated it. Henrik created the Tags with the following Powershell cmdlet.

New-Tag -Name "TestTag" -Category "TestCategory"

I created my Tags manually. When testing the behavior again, my wizard shows no error but Henrik wizard did. I told him to create the Tags also manually and after that the error was also gone.
There is obviously a problem when creating Tags with the Powershell cmdlet and not using the discription parameter. We think that the Powershell cmdlet is setting a NULL or similar value for the Tag description and therefor the error occurred.
If you have any further information about that, please leave a comment.
 

3 Responses

  1. Baiju says:

    It really helped to resolve the issue. Thank you..

  1. 12. February 2015

    […] a little digging, I ran across this post which pointed to the culprit not having anything to do with Storage Policies but to have to do with […]

  2. 26. February 2015

    […] It would appear that the above system error is generated when Tags are created using PowerCLI to which no description has been explicitly specified, as described here. […]

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