ESX 5.5 Connection error while establishing connection (11): Error connecting to /bin/vmx process..

[Hamberg]

We have running Citrix Xendesktop on Vmware since ESX 4.1 / 5.0  ... it's been going very well until we made the move to vSphere 5.5 ... Vms are booting via PXE BOOT on the network via Citrix Provisionning Server (so no virtual hard drive)....

We're getting theses errors when the Vm is powered on .. .sometimes 2 or 3 times in a row but not all the time ... it happen randomly on pretty much  .. sometimes the vm hangs and finally boots or becomes invalid! ... it hangs before going thru the bios

An error was received from the ESX host while powering on VM Sorel58.

Connection error while establishing connection (11): Error connecting to /bin/vmx process..

Cannot open a local pipe to local virtual machine '/vmfs/volumes/4ffaee43-4de550e3-5ddb-18a905431168/Sorel58/Sorel58.vmx

[habeebth7]

Even i get into same issue while powering on the VM. I had to kill the VM process and re register the VM. anybody has the reason when we get such error and why?

[Hamberg]

I found a solution

I've update all my ESX servers to the lastest version available at that time ... the problem had something to do with the Vm logs, every day a pretty large log was created for each vm i had trouble with, it seems that before powering on the vm ... the esx servers try to gain access to all the previous vm logs and for some reason. one of the log was still in use by another process, thats what was causing the delay ....  the problems would not go away after, it kept coming back ... so i went into the logs .. and some of the errors showing in there were resolved list of a ESX update!

Once i did the update.. everything went back to normal!

[habeebth7]

Hi Hamberg,

Thanks for the response. By the way what is the patch level of the host?

My host is at VMware ESXi 5.5.0 build-1746974 VMware ESXi 5.5.0 GA. Almost at latest version..

[Amit9999]

This was the error we received while powering on the vm

Error :An error was received from the ESX host while powering on VM pl-l1-tb-vm-15.

Connection error while establishing connection (11): Error connecting to /bin/vmx process..

Cannot open a local pipe to local virtual machine '/vmfs/volumes/551079d3-3dd1d1d4-910c-0017a47760e0/pl-l1-tb-vm-15/pl-l1-tb-vm-15.vmx'.

There found to be a active process running toward the vm.

esxcli vm process list

Ran the kill caommand (esxcli vm process kill --type= [soft,hard,force] --world-id= WorldNumber)

Post killing the process .We were able to power on the vm.

[mslagel2007]

This fix did it for me. Thank you for documenting this.