post-upgrade to vCloud Director 5.5 - Catalogs' status 'Unknown'

[peterdabr]

After upgrading from vCD 5.1.0 to 5.5 GA, I noticed that all public Catalogs have the status  'unknown'. Also, some of the dedicated Org-level catalogs are marked as 'unknown'.

What is happening here and can somebody tell me how to fix it?

Btw, I've come across this post with similar problem but at the VM level: https://communities.vmware.com/message/2244735

Thanks in advance for any help.

PD

[IamTHEvilONE]

Sounds similar to VMware KB: Uncatalogued vApp templates and media unusable after upgrade to vCloud Director 5.5

[peterdabr]

Thanks.

Unfortunately, this is not it. All of vApp templates under 'vApp Templates' tab are associated with various catalogs. It is the 'Catalogs' tab that lists all catalogs with the state 'unknown'.

Please see attached screenshot for more info.

Thanks

PD

[IamTHEvilONE]

I think the status is listed as unknown if any contents are listed as 'Unknown'.  For one of the smaller catalogs, can you open it and take a screen capture of the vApps/Media tabs?

[peterdabr]

Unfortunately, that's not the case. For every catalog with status 'Unknown', the content has all templates in 'Ready' state.

Please see the attached screenshot.

Thanks for your help thus far.

PD

[peterdabr]

Hi,

I'm not sure if you saw my last reply. At this point do you have any other things for me to check for or should I open a ticket with VMware support?

Thanks

PD

[IamTHEvilONE]

I'd open a ticket at this point.

[IamTHEvilONE]

Have you attempted to add anything to this catalog as of yet?  import an ISO from vCenter ... something?  I think immediately after the upgrade we might purge some old jobs, which I think this status is based on.  If you even just copy something into the catalog ... anything at all, it should update the status for the catalog to busy then to Ready.  If you have done this, then you might need to ship the DB to the tech working this.

[IamTHEvilONE]

I made some progress on this today.  What I need to know:

1. what is your activity retention policy in Admin > General?

2. when was this catalog created?  (you can query select * from catalog on the vCD DB)

if the create date is older than the retention policy, this status may show as 'unknown'.

The 'unknown' is a status based on querying old jobs for the creation status ... if it's older than 90 days (by default in vCD) then this might show as unknown.

even though it's called 'unknown' the status doesn't seem to mean anything, other than being ugly in the GUI.

[peterdabr]

Hi,

Thanks much for digging into this issue deeper.

1. "Activity log history to keep" 90 days

   "Activity log history shown": 30 days

2. The following is a list of all catalogs along with creation dates and status

1  Catalog	2013-11-06 12:23:46.997	Ready
2  Catalog	2013-10-02 21:22:52.043	Ready
3 Catalog	2013-09-25 23:08:14.093	Ready
4 Catalog	2013-09-25 22:08:59.507	Ready
5 Catalog	2013-09-14 19:53:21.863	Ready
6 Catalog	2013-09-06 17:33:42.207	Ready
7 Catalog	2013-08-09 20:50:53.530	Ready
8 Catalog	2013-08-08 16:15:10.323	Ready
9 Catalog	2013-07-27 06:00:28.740	Ready
10 Catalog	2013-07-12 15:56:09.627	Unknown
11 Catalog	2013-05-23 14:55:24.077	Ready
12 Catalog	2013-05-09 14:51:53.843	Unknown
13 Catalog	2013-05-07 16:38:06.390	Ready
14 Catalog	2013-05-01 13:39:57.923	Unknown
15 Catalog	2013-04-28 19:29:39.007	Ready
16 Catalog	2013-04-18 15:33:29.283	Ready
17 Catalog	2013-01-31 21:25:27.987	Unknown
18 Catalog	2013-01-04 20:57:52.160	Unknown
19 Catalog	2012-12-13 00:17:35.583	Unknown
20 Catalog	2012-08-27 22:53:09.837	Ready
21 Catalog	2012-05-28 16:25:18.827	Unknown
22 Catalog	2012-04-16 11:47:10.567	Unknown
23 Catalog	2012-04-15 22:22:48.780	Unknown
24 Catalog	2012-04-15 22:22:18.680	Unknown
25 Catalog	2012-04-15 22:21:56.637	Unknown
26 Catalog	2012-04-15 22:21:38.927	Unknown

It seems that there's some catalogs older than 90 days that have status as 'Ready' but I do understand you implication that this may or may not be the case for anything older than the retention policy.

The 'unknown' status of catalogs causes a lot of questions from my clients and makes the interface ugly. Would you be able to provide a query that fixes the status for all catalogs?

FYI, we've filed a case with VMware support so let me know if a database fix should be requested via support.

Thanks

PD

[IamTHEvilONE]

Yeah, if you can attach your DB to the support request via FTP ... that'll help.  I can't make a fix recommendation due to not having an exact root cause.  what's odd is that you have some older catalogs with a Ready status.

[peterdabr]

I'm sorry, are you asking me to attach DB to my support request so that *you* could look into it? Or are you merely mentioning this as a next step vmware support engineers should take?

[IamTHEvilONE]

latter.  I already have a report in with our development team, additional cases can be associated to the same report so long as we have sufficient information to confirm it's the same issue.

what is unique about your case is that some older catalogs still have the creation task stored in the jobs table, hence the ask for a copy of the vCloud Director database.

[IamTHEvilONE]

Please subscribe to changes on the following article:

VMware KB: vCloud Director 5.5 catalogs show status: UNKNOWN

URL: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2066989

Then you will be notified of updates to it.