One of my web hosting customers reported that emails sent from his account were returned with the following error message:

can't create user output file. Command output: procmail: Renaming bogus mailbox

What was going on?

When creating an NFS datastore on an ESXi host the other day, I received the following error message:

An error occurred during host configuration.

If you look at the task details it says:

Operation failed, diagnostics report: Unable to complete Sysinfo operation. 
Please see the VMkernel log file for more details.

What was causing the issue?

I recently tried to export the system logs from an ESXi via the vSphere client. Instead of receiving the generated bundled the host returned:

A general system error occurred: internal error

Very informative error message, no? I looked at the logs visible from the vSphere client and realized they were all dated before ESXi was installed. What was going on?

I moved my site to a new server last month, did you notice? Well, maybe some of you did as the server was unavailable for a brief amount of time. The good news is I was able to document the process so next time it will be completely transparent.

Quick issue for you today. I was attempting to clone a RHEL 5 VM with a guest customization and the operation kept failing with: fault.CustomizationPending.summary. Turns out the VM I was attemping to clone was previously cloned with a guest customization, but was never powered on. The resolution is simply to power on the VM and once it boots up shut it down. Then you should be able to clone the VM with a guest customization without issue. VMware posted a KB article on the issue (http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1006809), but it only refers to VirtualCenter 2.5.x though I just experienced this issue on vCenter Server 4.1.