while poking around brand new installation of free edition of vmware vsphere 5 i managed to screw up the firewall.
in result any changes done in vshpere client in configuration>security profile>firewall properties were resulting with errors:
Call "HostFirewallSystem.UpdateRuleset" for object "firewallSystem" on ESXi "host" failed. Operation failed, diagnostics report: Sysinfo error on operation returned status : Already exists. Please see the VMkernel log for detailed error information
i’ve found a solution here. to get rid of errors from gui i had to:
- ssh to the vsphare server, and edit the /etc/vmware/esx.conf using vi. i had to remove all lines /firewall/services/{servicename}/allowedip/ipstr that referred to single hosts – i’ve written them using /32 notation.
- reboot the server