Deans Blog

Following VM Storage Polices being enabled for a compute resource object in vSphere 5.5 and the attempt to create the first VM Storage Policy the following system error message was received:

com.vmware.vim.binding.vmodl.fault.SystemError:
reason = PbmExtendedElementDescription required property summary not set
inherited from com.vmware.vim.binding.vmodl.fault.SystemError: Failed to serialize response

It would appear that the above system error is generated when Tags are created using PowerCLI to which no description has been explicitly specified, as described here.

In order to resolve the issue, I used the offender PowerCLI to create my description value for the Tags, where the value would be <Category>\<Name>, as below:

$Tags = Get-Tag 
ForEach ($Tag in $Tags)
    { 
    $Tag | Set-Tag -Description $Tag 
    } 

Once the Tag description value had been populated I was able to create VM Storage policies with no issues.