Virtual Center 2.0.1 Patch2

[hicksj]

Its now out. Applied it this afternoon. A couple notes:

When it comes back online, it will attempt to upgrade the vpx agents on all your hosts. I found that several upgrade attempts failed, a couple recovered. One host did not, remaining in a disconnected state.

Had to apply the vpxagent upgrade manually for that host's VC connectivity to be restored:

\- copy Program Files\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter 2.0\upgrade\vpx-upgrade-esx-6-linux-40644 to your host

\- run 'sh vpx-upgrade-esx-6-linux-40644' at the console, followed by 'service mgmt-vmware restart'

\- in VC, right-click host, Connect

Another note:

HA gets reconfigured on all the hosts. Same with DRS. We found that DRS started moving things all around (we have it automated), so the upgrade process will potentially generate significant load on your hosts.

HA reconfiguration failed on a few hosts. Removing HA from the cluster, then re-enabling it restored HA.

You may want to consider disabling HA & DRS on your clusters before upgrading Virtual Center.[/b]

Regards,

J

Message was edited by:

hicksj

[hicksj]

I think this patch will make my DBA happy,

It should. FYI, We've seen the size of our DB drop by 25% since updating. (and this doesn't seem to be due to any errors in the upgrade process)

although I think I will let you guys test it out a while longer before I upgrade.

Yeah, probably not a bad idea either. I don't know what the heck we were thinking deploying a patch so quickly!

[bretti]

We have definitely seen an increase in performance. Before the patch, just navigating through the different tabs and waiting for the summary screen to populate was painfully slow. Today after the patch everything is much snappier. Everyone over here is happy with the performance fixes.

I didn't much care for the issues upgrading the agents but that was fairly minor, just time consuming.

[bretti]

I did not have the same luck as you. VC did not manage to upgrade the agents on all of my hosts. I had to do it manually on several ESX 3 and ESX 2 systems.

It seemed like it was mostly due to slow WAN connections in our environment. Has anyone else had issues upgrading the host agents to servers over WAN connections?

[gogogo5]

is there a way to check the version of the vpxagent on a host so you can double-check before and after the upgrade?

[hicksj]

It seemed like it was mostly due to slow WAN

connections in our environment. Has anyone else had

issues upgrading the host agents to servers over WAN

connections?

My WAN connected hosts were among the few hosts that successfully updated.

[hicksj]

is there a way to check the version of the vpxagent

on a host so you can double-check before and after

the upgrade?

# vpxa -v[/code]

[bowulf]

Thank you...

[dpomeroy]

I had to restart mgmt-vmware on 6 of 16 hosts.

[boydd]

Just upgraded my VC 2.x environment to VC 2.0.1 Patch 2 - Just like Don said - I had to run "service mgmt-vmware restart" on all the ESX 3.0.1 hosts to get the new agent on them and connected. One thing that I have noticed is that the licensing server remains at build 10.13 (I thought there was a newer version than that of Patch 1?).

DB

[jpoling]

I downloaded the patch yesterday and when I went to extract the zip today it said it was corrupt. . .now I cannot find the patch on vmware's site. . .anyone ahve a link where I can get Patch 2?

Also, restarting the mgmt agents on the esx hosts - is that non-disruptive to the hosts and VMs?

Jeff

[esiebert7625]

http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vc-201-200702-patch.html

[RyanWI]

Ours went much worse! I ended up having toe run the script you posted below on all of our hosts to get them to come back into the VC server. Unfortunately now I receive a authentication error between the VC server and all of the VMs. Tools status shows "Not Installed" and the console is blank. I also get an error saying username/password incorrect.

Yikes, any ideas??

[Jae_Ellers]

Just upgraded my VC 2.x environment to VC 2.0.1 Patch

2 - Just like Don said - I had to run "service

mgmt-vmware restart" on all the ESX 3.0.1 hosts to

get the new agent on them and connected. One thing

that I have noticed is that the licensing server

remains at build 10.13 (I thought there was a newer

version than that of Patch 1?).

DB

On config services tab look at Path to license file. Previously it was C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware License Server\Licenses\vmware.lic.

Now it is C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware License Server\Licenses.

Doesn't look like the lmtools itself was updated but a license server update definitely ran and changed the lic file to the license folder.

[Jae_Ellers]

Ours went much worse! I ended up having toe run the

script you posted below on all of our hosts to get

them to come back into the VC server. Unfortunately

now I receive a authentication error between the VC

server and all of the VMs. Tools status shows "Not

Installed" and the console is blank. I also get an

error saying username/password incorrect.

Yikes, any ideas??

If all else fails delete the user vpxuser and add the host back, but this will basically start your host over in VC and you'll lose perf data & vm inventory folder locations.

[Anders]

Are you guys running /tmp on a separate partiotion?

\- Anders

[LarsLiljeroth]

Yes we are runniing /tmp seperate on a 2 gb part.

I updated to Path2 and it updated all my VC agent with out any issues. And yes the guest listing is faster ( could be even faster

/Lars

[jesse_gardner]

My upgrade was not so straightforward, but I got through it. I have a straightforward setup: VC on Windows 2003 SP1 server, remote SQL 2000 database. Seperate /tmp partition on the ESX hosts.

1. The upgrade would seem to get most of the way through, and then roll back, cancelling the patch. This occurred several times. I had to reboot the VC server, then the patch took fine.

2. Two of my six hosts were state: disconnected after the patch. After a lot of messing around, here's what I had to do:

- scp the vpx upgrade script to the hosts

- run 'sh vpx-upgrade-esx-6-linux-40644'

- at this point, if I ran 'service mgmt-vmware restart', I still couldn't 'Connect' in VC. Getting the two messages below in vpxa.log:

\[2007-03-06 23:31:15.397 'App' 3076465568 error] \[VpxVmdbCnx] Authd error: 514 Error connecting to hostd-vmdb service instance.

\[2007-03-06 23:31:15.397 'App' 3076465568 error] \[VpxVmdbCnx] Failed to connect to host :902. Check that authd is running correctly (lib/connect error 11)

- After a lot of messing around, I had consistent success with these steps:

+ service mgmt-vmware stop

+ service vmware-vmkauthd stop

+ service vpxa stop

+ service mgmt-vmware start

+ service vmware-vmkauthd start

+ service vpxa start

- Connect in VC worked at this point

Everything looks fine now.

[esiebert7625]

Well my experience installing this patch was terrible. I disabled HA as recommended first. Then ran the installer to upgrade the Virtual Center server. This ran successfully but when I started the VC console it reported that 3 of my servers were upgraded successfully and 1 "Failed to install virtual center agent" so it could not see that server anymore.

I went into that server and did vpxa -v and it reported that it was still on the old version. I then did service mgmt-vmware restart, it reported two OK's and then hung on this. At this point all my VM's on that server shutdown. The task was still hung so I finally restarted the ESX server. Once the server came back up I checked the vpxa -v again and it was still the old version. I manually copied the vpx-upgrade-esx-6-linux-40644 file to the server as suggested and ran it successfully. I then did a service vmware-vpxa restart and service mgmt-vmware restart. Once again all my VM's shutdown. I had to power them all back up manually and then checked the VC server and it could now see the ESX server.

Why the heck would my VM's keep powering down, I did not have HA enabled and am not using DRS.

btw, this is a good post to manually install the agent on the server...

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=488252&#488252

[esiebert7625]

And also btw, I called support (Platinum) when this happened and opened a critical case. They said they would call back in 30 minutes, never happened. Finally received an email from the tech about an hour later suggesting I upgrade my VIC client on my PC and also restarting the 2 services, vpxa/mgmt-vmware. You think on a critical case they would call you instead of email you.

[RyanWI]

Please keep us posted. We're having continued issues on doing this ourselves.

We have everything back in VC but now the hosts can't see each others VMDKs... Some type of compatability thing I think.