VMware multipathd log spam

2021-04-07 3 min read Technology Ronny Trommer

While I was deploying Loki with Promtail I’ve seen a lot of log spam from Ubuntu virtual machines in my VMware environment. As a note to myself and for some others who want cleaner system logs – here is what I’ve found to get rid of it.

The log entries look like these here:

2021-04-07 20:14:21 opennms-bgp multipathd[693]: sda: failed to get sgio uid: No such file or directory
2021-04-07 20:14:21 opennms-bgp multipathd[693]: sda: failed to get sysfs uid: Invalid argument
2021-04-07 20:14:21 opennms-bgp multipathd[693]: sda: failed to get udev uid: Invalid argument
2021-04-07 20:14:21 opennms-bgp multipathd[693]: sda: add missing path

The best article I’ve found was from SUSE describing the problems source. In a nutshell, VMware doesn’t provide information needed by udev to generate the /dev/disk/by-id. To solve the problem you have to set in the Virtual Machine the attribute disk.EnableUUID=true. For the reason I have a few VM’s it’s pretty tidious to do all these things manually.