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Krasi69
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VMWare vCenter cannor run power-on script successfully

Hello,
I cannot login to our vCenter 6.0 with Internet Explorer and I receive an error. I tried to upgrade the VMWare Tools with the following steps:

1. Inventory

2. Virtual Machine

3. Guest

4. Install / Upgrade VMWare Tools

I restarted the vCenter VM but the VM Tools were not upgraded. I received and error in the Events Log which you can see on the attached
screenshot. Then I setup the VM Tools to be upgraded automatically during the VM restart with the below steps:

1. Edit virtual machine settings

2. Options

3. VMWare Tools

4. Check and upgrade Tools during power cycling - selected

5. OK

I power off and then power on the vCenter virtual machine but the tools again were not updated. Then I tried to login with SSH client to this
vCenter VM. When I login there I received the message "Error connecting to the server". I was not able to execute any Linux commands.
The log files are attached to this post. Can you please help me to fix our vCenter 6.0 virtual machine ?

1 Solution

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Lalegre
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As far i can see in your logs. The paths that you say that are missing are regarding the vmware.log that is from the VM Itself. If you login into the vCenter VM using SSH do you have those folders?

If you do not have those folders i would really encourage you to restore a backup or if it is not much trouble to go ahead and install a newly supported vCenter Server. You can upgrade the licenses to install vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 and i also think vSphere 7.

On the other side your ESXi host is compatible with vSphere 6.0 U3 maximum so you will have to still be in version 6.0.

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Lalegre
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Hey Krasi,

It is not needed to update the VMware Tools of the VCSA as them got in the bundle of the installation ISO and they are only being upgraded when you upgrade VCSA. However the issue you are facing is not VMware Tools related and is related to some services probably with errors.

What is the output of service-control --status -all?

Do you have enought free space on the VCSA? Show the output of df -h

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Krasi69
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Hi Lalegre,

Thank you for your help. I login with SSH client to my VM and I ran the service-control command.
You can see the output in the attached text file.

Then I ran the df -h command but the system cannot execute it. I attached a screenshot from the
web client with the disk space for this VM. You can see that the root directory / has 0% free space.
I think that this issue is the cause for the failure of my VM. 

Can you please tell me which files I can delete to free up some space ? And how I can delete
these files ?

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Lalegre
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Then definetely that is your issue.

Go to /var/log and see for files with .tgz or .gz extension that mean older log files that have been packed, those are safe to delete.

Also you can check for bigger files using the next command: find / -size +10M -exec du -h {} \; | less

After you clean those logs go ahead an restart your vCenter Server.

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Krasi69
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Hi Lalegre,

I go to "Troubleshooting Mode" of my vCenter 6.0 VM console. Then I choose "Enable BASH Shell" and I click ENTER.
You can see the attached screenshot. After that I login with SSH client to the vCenter VM. I run the shell command.
I receive the message "Shell is disabled". Then I run the command shell.set --enabled True . I receive "Unknown command".

Can you please tell me how I can enable the Bash Shell and execute Linux commands ?

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Lalegre
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To be easier for you please follow the next procedure: https://vsaiyan.info/2018/01/09/solved-vcenter-appliance-root-partition-100-full-plus-unable-to-log-...

Maybe the log to clean is not the same but it will help you entering the GRUB and do the cleanup. Also the Enable BASH Shell is to access the console from inside vCenter, not to login using SSH. So if inside the console you trigger Alt + F1 you will jump to the BASH Console.

However i still think that you need to follow the procedure mentioned above as you probably will not be able to login there also because of the root parition being full.

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Krasi69
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Hi Lalegre,

Thanks again for your help. I ran the Bash Shell and I deleted all unnecessary archives and log files. Then I restarted
the vCenter VM and I received the same error when I tried to login with web browser. Now the situation is better and I
have more free space in the root directory. But from the web client I see that there are only 2% free space for the
folder /storage/log .

When I check this folder in the bash shell I see that 55% is used of it's space. There are 2 sub-folders inside but I cannot
enter there. Do I have to delete any other files to free up more space for the /storage/log folder ?

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scott28tt
VMware Employee
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I would have suggested opening a request with VMware Support, however 6.0 is no longer supported.

If this is anything like a production environment in terms of your VM workloads, you should consider upgrading to at least 6.5.


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Although I am a VMware employee I contribute to VMware Communities voluntarily (ie. not in any official capacity)
VMware Training & Certification blog
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Lalegre
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This is probably an issue between the VAMI and the information you actual have in the VM. For the moment you can disregard this.

If you still having issue most probably you have some services down. Run the next command: service-control --status -all and look for stopped services.

You may see a lot of them and not all of them are needed for vCenter to work so past the output here and then we can focus on the logs of the important ones.

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Krasi69
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Hi Lalegre,

I attached all the logs to this post. I see from the logs in the zip file that the following folders are missing in our vCenter:
/usr/lib/vmware/config
/etc/vmware/config
/etc/vmware/preferences
I think that due to the full hard disk the above 3 folders were deleted. Also there is SSL error in the logs.
Probably there are 3 ways for recovery of all the missing files and folders:

1) Manual recovery of all the missing files and folders
2) Re-installation of VMware vCenter 6.0 for Linux. I think that the source files are : VMware-VMvisor-Installer 6.0*.iso .
3) Upgrade to VMWare vCenter 7.0 for Linux. Our license is for 6.0 and we should pay for new license. Our server is:

Model: HP ProLiant DL380 G7
CPU Cores: 8 CPUs x 2.4 GHz
Processor Type: Intel (R) Xeon (R) CPU E5620 @ 2.40 GHz
Processor Sockets: 2
Cores per Socket: 4
Logical Processors: 16
Memory Capacity: 65525.73 MB
Storage: Server RAID 5   6.54 TB


Can I fix this issue with the 1st or 2nd method ?

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Lalegre
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As far i can see in your logs. The paths that you say that are missing are regarding the vmware.log that is from the VM Itself. If you login into the vCenter VM using SSH do you have those folders?

If you do not have those folders i would really encourage you to restore a backup or if it is not much trouble to go ahead and install a newly supported vCenter Server. You can upgrade the licenses to install vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 and i also think vSphere 7.

On the other side your ESXi host is compatible with vSphere 6.0 U3 maximum so you will have to still be in version 6.0.

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Krasi69
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Last question and I will close this topic.

I downloaded the vCenter 6.0 installation file VMware-VCSA-all-6.0.0-9451619.iso from my.vmware.com . I think that this ISO
file has both Windows and Linux installations. Then I power on the vCenter VM. After that I connected this ISO file to the
CD/DVD drive in vSphere Client. This installation in Windows is easy as I have to double-click one HTML file. How I can start this
installation in Linux ? Do I have to restart my VM ?

Thanks for all the help !

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Lalegre
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If you are going to do a new installation you just need to mount the .iso in any Windows and run the HTML file. You will also be requested to install the Client Integration Plug-in if you do not have it.

You can even run this from your PC if you have Windows and then follow through the installation process. You can do exactly the same on Linux but it must be a Desktop not a Server with CLI only.