Symptoms
Powering on or migrating a virtual machine fails with error:
An error was received from the ESX host while powering on VM. Transport (VMDB) error -45: Failed to connect to peer process.
The vmx binary (in the /bin folder) which is required for a VM to power on is blocked.You see message similar to:
2017-04-20T14:23:50.533Z cpu9:256411)WARNING: User: 4530: vmx: Error in initial cartel setup: Failed to open /bin/vmx: Operation not permitted
Cause
This issue occurs when Unlocker has been installed on the ESXi host:
Resolution
Confirm the presence of the Unlocker installation on the ESXi host using one or more of the following commands. # $ grep unlock ls_-isla-.txt
75521 4 drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 512 Apr 11 18:32 unlocker
# vdf -h:
=========
Ramdisk Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
root 32M 1M 30M 6% --
etc 28M 288K 27M 1% --
opt 32M 0B 32M 0% --
var 48M 452K 47M 0% --
tmp 256M 20K 255M 0% --
iofilters 32M 0B 32M 0% --
hostdstats 2053M 3M 2049M 0% --
unlocker 100M 92M 8M 92% --
$ grep 'Mount\|unlocker' localcli_system-visorfs-ramdisk-list.txt
Ramdisk Name Mount Point
unlocker /unlocker
Unlocker software is not a VMware product, and is not supported for use on ESXi by VMware. It is used to enable OS X to run on non-Apple hardware. This software creates a symlink for /bin/vmx to point to /unlocker/vmx, which prevents any executable that are not part of the ESXi base system VIB. This leads to Operation not permitted error against the ESXi vmx binary above.
To work around this issue:
Uninstall the Unlocker software on the ESXi host using the uninstaller bundled with Unlocker,Reboot the host.Assuming the uninstaller cleans up properly, removes the symlink in /binChange back any permissions that have been modifiedPower on the VM
