After trying to start a virtual machine vCloud Director displayed a “Cannot Start” message:
Further investigation of this message revealed some extra, not very valuable, information: “Internal Server Error”:
Wow, I am always very happy with the clear and descriptive error messages vCloud Director displays after something goes wrong (NOT). The vcloud-container-debug.log contained in /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs showed some additional information:
It seems vCloud Director cannot find the virtual machine. After investigating the vSphere inventory it seems this particular virtual machine was not available anymore, at least not in the correct vCD resource pool. The virtual machine was moved to the root of the vSphere inventory tree; probably the result of a storage outage we’ve suffered.
After moving the virtual machine to the original location (the correct resource pool), everything seems to be working fine.
Be careful because the ‘internal server error’ message can be linked to different problems. I suggest to always investigate the vClourd Director log files to pinpoint the problem!
Also check this article by Magnus Andersson which also deals with this error message.
