cloned vcenter appliance services not starting

[billdossett]

Before upgrading my vcenter appliance which is running 6.7 update 1... I looked at it and in needs disk consolidation.  It  will no consolidate, keeps saying that the first disk on it is locked or something, I have tried all the unlocking tricks and with it powered down vmotioning and tracking down the host that supposedly has it locked, maint mode and restarting it and I can't get it to consolidate - so pretty much given up on that.

I cloned it - seems to me I've cloned a vcenter server appliance in the past and it worked ok, but on my clone - only the vmware-pod service starts.  When trying service-control --start --all it gives an error message...

#service-control --start --all
Operation not cancellable. Please wait for it to finish...
Performing start operation on service lwsmd...
Service lwsmd startup type is not automatic. Skip
Performing start operation on service vmafdd...
.... more of this...

like that.... which I found in vCenter services not starting automatically after a restore from an image based backup. (78042) (vmw...

and I tried unmasking vmware-vmon.service and then starting the services, and it gets further - but things that normally start immediately, like lwsmd etc are not starting and it just sits with 

applmgmt vmware-analytics vmware-pod vmware-postgres-archiver vmware-rhttpproxy vmware-statsmonitor vmware-vmon vmware-vpostgres

started and a few pending...  and the rest stopped..  Is it possible to clone a vcenter appliance and bring it up?  I swear I've done it in the past, but this is a site I don't normally deal with and I wish I didn't as it always throws some bizzaro bs at me...  

I've taken a VAMI backup of the vcenter this morning and I guess I will try to deploy a new vcenter tomorrow if I can't get this to work, but if anyone has any sage advice to chip in I'm ALL ears!  Thanks

Bill

[a_p_]

I can't help you much with the cloned instance. However, regarding the locked disk, do you use a VM based backup, that hot-adds the VM's virtual disks to the backup server, or to backup proxies? I've seen similar locking issues, where a backup just didn't detach a hot-added disk from the backup/proxy.

Other than this, I think the VAMI (file) based backup that you took is probably the best way to re-install a new vCenter Server instance.

André

[billdossett]

on the locked disk - they just started backing this up with NetVault before my upgrade as a backup... and that does do snapshots to backup...  but also there was a snapshot that someone had taken - over a year ago 😞 which I deleted.  I expect one or the other of those resulted in the consolidation needed problem and locked disk...  also on the locked disk... with vmfstools, I can see that two hosts have locks on it.  The host it is running on, fair enough, which you would think it would deal with when I try to consolidate and then another host, which I have evacuated and rebooted - but this lock never goes away... at some point it even moved to another host while I was rebooting.. pretty aggravating.   Always on the first disk as well from what the vpxd log says.

This is a vcenter with an external PSC... the PSC needed consolidation as well, so again pointing to the netvault backup as they started backing that up as well... I was able to consolidate the PSC... by cloning it and the new one is working fine.  I haven't done a VAMI restore with external PSC before - like I say I don't usually work on this site, but I assume if the PSC is ok, I just proceed with the restore of the vcenter and it should be ok?  no gotchas there?  I hope...