Solved: Re: Upgrade vMA 4.0 to 4.1 using vima-update

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

View solution in original post

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

lamw · ‎07-13-2010

I concur with your findings, the only thing that's listed as of this morning trying this command on vMA 4.0 host which has access to the VMware are security bulletins. I don't see a metadata file to upgrade from 4.0 to 4.1 and looking at download page, there is not an offline upgrade package either.

[vi-admin@syslog ~]$ sudo vima-update scan
Password:
vmw-VIMA-4.0.0-metadata.zip                                   ####################################################################################### [100%]

Applicable bulletins with updates are listed.
---Bulletin ID--- ---Date--- --------------Summary--------------
VIMA400-200906001 2009-07-13 Security Patch for Red Hat RPMs.
VIMA400-200911002 2009-11-23 Security update for vMA (KB1014689)
VIMA400-201002201 2010-02-24 Security update for vMA (KB1017122)

Looks like someone missed something with the release of vSphere 4.1. Let me hit up some of the guys I know at VMware to see if they can help with this

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009,2010

VMware scripts and resources at:

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

lamw · ‎07-13-2010

I just got word that VMware will be putting up the vMA 4.1 packages tonight. So either later this evening or tomorrow, you should be able to use vima-update to upgrade from vMA 4.0 to vMA 4.1

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009,2010

VMware scripts and resources at:

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

http://www.novell.com/news/press/vmware-and-novell-expand-strategic-partnership-to-deliver-and-suppo...

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

q8_it · ‎07-13-2010

Thanks for the update

cskowmh · ‎07-13-2010

So we're going to be able to update this in place even though it's moving from RHEL to CentOS? That's interesting. Also I thought due to the new agreement between Novell and VMware all VMware appliances were going to use SLES from now on?

I guess vMA missed the boat!

DSTAVERT · ‎07-13-2010

The current vMA 4.0 is based on Centos.

-- David -- VMware Communities Moderator

lamw · ‎07-13-2010

Well, CentOS is just the free version of RHEL and it actually uses the RHEL source to develop a very similar version. Hence, the inline upgrade with regards to the packages should operate the same. What will be odd, is if you have vMA 4.0 -> 4.1 upgrade and you deploy a brand new vMA 4.1, you will have different OSes but they both operate very similar using same set of commands/etc.

With regards to the SLES, yes that is true going forward for any new vApps. I know they're most likely retro-fitting current vApps being distributed but it'll take some time. It would be pretty sudden if they had a switch in this release, so I would expect a SLES version of vMA sometime in the future.

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009,2010

VMware scripts and resources at:

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

cskowmh · ‎07-13-2010

$ rpm -q centos-release

package centos-release is not installed

$ cat /etc/redhat-release

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.2 (Tikanga)

Looks like RHEL to me... I could be missing something though.

lamw · ‎07-13-2010

That's correct, vMA 4.0 is RHEL5.2 and not CentOS.

Though both, will have /etc/redhat-release file, they'll show different the right OS:

RHEL:

[vi-admin@scofield ]$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.2 (Tikanga)

CentOS:

[primp@build-centos ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS release 5.4 (Final)

You can also query for the RPM packages to see if they're cenos or rhel

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009,2010

VMware scripts and resources at:

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

DSTAVERT · ‎07-13-2010

My mistake, you are correct. I restarted two appliances over the weekend not just one. The vdr appliance is the one using Centos.

-- David -- VMware Communities Moderator

Doctair · ‎07-13-2010

William do you think there is any real benefit of deploying the new CENTOS appliance over upgrading an existing RHEL 4.0 vMA?

Also I followed your vMA CLI update instructions on your blog to update the 4.0 appliance to U2. Assuming that the latest 4.1 CLI tools will be pre-installed do you think future Ux updates can be applied using the same method?

Cheers

lamw · ‎07-13-2010

Hard to say ... for me personally, vMA is stateless to me. All my scripts are backed up or checked into SVN. If you have your vMA host manage your hosts using vi-fastpass ... it could be a problem but even then, you can easily re-create those entries on the new host. It'll depend on how you setup your vMA host.

Regarding your second questions, yes I expect/hope that is the case in the future that releases/updates to vMA, vCLI, vSphere SDK for Perl can be pushed through vima-update or what is now known as vma-update. The other issue is their use of both "vima" and "vma" which spawned from their legacy release, you'll see that in their commands, files and URLs. Hoping that gets resolved soon as well

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009,2010

VMware scripts and resources at:

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

lamw · ‎07-13-2010

As of 7:54pm PST, I can see the new vMA 4.1 package update using vima-update

[vi-admin@syslog ~]$ sudo vima-update scan
Password:
vmw-VIMA-4.0.0-metadata.zip                                   ####################################################################################### [100%]

Applicable bulletins with updates are listed.
Bulletin ID ---Date--- -----Summary------
VIMA410-GA  2010-07-13 VIMA 4.1 GA update

I'm updating a test vMA host right now

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009,2010

VMware scripts and resources at:

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

ThorstenT · ‎07-15-2010

Hi,

I already updated one of my vMAs without major issues. /etc/redhat-release contains "CentOS release 5.3" after the upgrade.

One problem came up regarding vima-update:

[root@vma tmp]# vima-update scan
                                ######################################## [100%]

Encountered error MetadataFormatError:
The error data is:
   Filename    - /var/tmp/esxupdate/metadata-2760350473111833260/metadata.zip
   Message     - Error unzipping
                 /var/tmp/esxupdate/metadata-2760350473111833260/metadata.zip:
                 File is not a zip file
   Errno       - 5
   Description - The format of the metadata is invalid.

Problem is the depot URL http://www.vmware.com/go/vma41/update in /etc/vmware/esxupdate/vmaupdate.conf currently gives a 404. The python stuff used for downloading the patches seem to lack some error handling, because somehow the HTML code of http://www.vmware.com/ ends up in metadata.zip. This probably should not happen.

Regards,

Thorsten

lamw · ‎07-15-2010

I too noticed that after the upgrade, I think they may still be working on the depot. I'll let the PM know about this issue as well.

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009,2010

VMware scripts and resources at:

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

cskowmh · ‎07-16-2010

Make sure you look over the release notes before you update. If you primarily use your vMA to log into your esxi servers for esxtop, you may not want to update. resxtop no longer works with vifpinit at all, so you have to log in by hand every time now. This was my primary use for it for day to day use, so this sort of stinks.

Also, has anyone set up the vi-authconfig AD passthrough yet?

lamw · ‎07-16-2010

Wow, another gotcha .... no good.

I can confirm on a newly deployed vMA 4.1 host w/ESX(i) 4.1 hosts that resxtop looks like it's not compatible with vi-fastpass .... sigh

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009,2010

VMware scripts and resources at:

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators

If you find this information useful, please award points for "correct" or "helpful".

cskowmh · ‎07-16-2010

To be fair, they have it in the release notes:

resxtop requires username/password in vi-fastpass environment. You add one or more targets to vMA, initialize vi-fastpass using the command vifptarget -s , then you call resxtop against any target, vMA still requires you to provide the credentials for the target.

Workaround: Provide target's username/password for resxtop command manually.

It's just... unfortunate.

lamw · ‎07-16-2010

Yea I saw...but this seems to be a downgrade in a feature .... generally with releases, you provide feature enhancements and not removal.

=========================================================================

William Lam

VMware vExpert 2009,2010

VMware scripts and resources at:

VMware Code Central - Scripts/Sample code for Developers and Administrators