VI 2.5u1, ESX 3.0.2
One on my QA Engineer created a Chinese Windows XP VM. It worked for a long time, until he gave it a Computer Name in Windows with Chinese character. Within a minute or two, that entire ESX host went grey in the Virtual Infrastructure Client. I was able to succesfully disconnect the host, but when I tried to reconnect it, I would get a "not well formed" error. After some experimentation, I realized that if I paused that one VM, I could then reconnect with no difficulties. Restarting the VM causes loss of connectivity again.
I did some searching at the tme (this was about a week ago) and saw some references to UTF8 parsing problems, but in a different context.
I theorize that the Computer Name is being sent to the ESX host via the VMWare Tools, and that the ESX host or VC is having some sort of XML parsing error due to the UTF8 translation, causing the disconnect.
It's not an immediate problem, because I have paused the offending host and told the QA Engineer "don't do that". But we would like foreign-language names to work (it's a minor part of our testing for our own product we develop), and I don't like the idea that one bad VM is taking out an entire ESX Server. (Though, the VMs keep running.) It's probably also a minor securiy issue, at least it's a DoS.
Anyone seen similar or have a fix? Any more specific debugging info I can collect?