Failed to open a session while starting a virtual machine

[Bhushan]

Virtual Box version 5.1.4

Mac OS X El Capitan version 10.11.6 with McAfee Endpoint protection

16GB Ram, Intel Core I7 processor

I installed virtualbox on my Mac & then imported an OVA [Oracle DB developer apps VM, an old version released in 2013].

The VM n/w settings were NAT with port forwarding enabled [localhost port 1700 & guest VM port 1700]. On starting the VM, it failed with the following message -

Failed to open a session for the virtual machine DevVM.

The VM session was aborted.

Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component: SessionMachine
Interface: ISession {7844aa05-b02e-4cdd-a04f-ade4a762e6b7}

Setting the n/w to Nothing or NAT network allows the VM to boot without any issues.

To avoid any suspicion with the old OVA, I downloaded a CentOS minimal OVA from the following location -

​https://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualappliances/files/Linux/CentOS/CentOS-6.4-i386-minimal.ova

It too failed with the same error, & changing the n/w settings to Nothing or NAT network worked.

I had disabled the McAfee Endpoint protection in both cases, still there was one process McAfee process running in the background -

bhushan:~$ kextstat | grep -v com.apple
Index Refs Address            Size       Wired      Name (Version) UUID <Linked Against>
  143    3 0xffffff7f8329f000 0x61000    0x61000    org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxDrv (5.1.4) 63317E7D-29D2-38A1-9B7C-BA930B0E017E <7 5 4 3 1>
  146    0 0xffffff7f83300000 0x8000     0x8000     org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxUSB (5.1.4) 40E1F37A-3BAE-3E82-A8CE-8DEB364664E3 <145 143 39 7 5 4 3 1>
  147    0 0xffffff7f83308000 0x5000     0x5000     org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxNetFlt (5.1.4) 1E11B050-BCCD-31BF-82AC-DACA1E2EB803 <143 7 5 4 3 1>
  148    0 0xffffff7f8330d000 0x6000     0x6000     org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxNetAdp (5.1.4) 1EE6EA19-32FB-3EF4-93B4-E4AF47EF4051 <143 5 4 1>
  149    0 0xffffff7f83313000 0xe000     0xe000     com.McAfee.AVKext (1) 7116ADFA-51F7-3BC3-8206-BEC1C180A1E0 <4 1>
bhushan:~$

NOTE: Uninstalling McAfee is not an option for me as this is a company provided machine & IT team would not be happy with it.

Logs attached:

VBox.log - for the DevVM [oracle DB VM from 2013]

CentOS-6.4-i386-minimal-2016-09-12-10-52-32.log - for the CentOS VM

[Bhushan]

CentOS VM vbox log

[Bhushan]

Dev VM vbox log

[Bhushan]

Please also see discussion on the forum -

​https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=79623

Issue might be related to 3rd party extensions installed on the machine & the NAT settings.