Today I cloned a VM Management PC in a customer environment to have a spare one, you know just in case something would happen :) After a successful clone, re-joining the domain and all the typical tasks to a Windows Server VM, I fired up the vSphere Client which was already installed before the clone. My heart literally skipped a beat at the point where I noticed that there were a lot of weird messages in the recent tasks pane, and just to make sure I opened the Tasks & Events tab of that particular Virtual Machine. At first I thought that there was something royally screwed up during the time that I cloned the VM. Luckily a really quick search on my favourite search engine resulted in a VMware KB article regarding the issue.
VMware tasks and events XXX syntax error
Apparently the localization was lost during the cloning of the VM and resulted in weird vSphere Client behaviour. The KB article mentions that this happend with non English Operating System locales, but in this case it was Windows Server 2008 R2 which was only being used in English. So that doesn’t explain the issue. None the less, the way to resolve the problem was to use the “-locale en_US” switch when starting the vSphere client. Do note that your vSphere Client can also be in the (x86) folder.
"C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\VpxClient.exe" -locale en_US
or
"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\VpxClient.exe" -locale en_US
You can find the VMware KB article here.
