VMware vCenter Update Manager Scan Failure

I was troubleshooting a VMware vCenter and vSAN, that does an automated VUM scan on all vSAN cluster, to check there compliance with the vSAN baselines, and they was failing.

The error in the vCenter was: “There are errors during the scan operation. Check……”.

I did some checks in the vCenter appliance and the Update Manager logs, without any results.

So i checked the logs on the hosts.

The /var/log/esxupdate.log did not have any good information, but the /var/log/vua.log, did have some information about some errors.

ProcessLookupError: [Errno 3] No such process

'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 62398: ordinal not in range(128)

After some searching i found that the last error comes when, the VUM is executing the “esxcfg-info” command on the hosts, and it is reading thru this, it comes across some information that contains none-English letters, in this case it was some danish characters “æøå” in the VM names.

So the solution was to rename the Virtual Machines and vMotioned them to another host, the process on the host does not change, when changing the name, but it does on the receiving host from a vMotion or power off/power on of the Virtual Machine.

So if you see this error check for none-English characters in Virtual Machine names, Port Groups, vSwitches, Datastores, and other on the hosts.