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raycward
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

How to obtain older version of Skyline OVA (vm hardware version 11)

I have a cluster that is still running esxi 6.0 and when you attempt to deploy the OVA it fails as it require vm hardware version 13 (which >= esxi 6.5)

Is there an older version of the OVA that supports ESXi 6.0 and hardware version 11 that I can deploy and upgrade to 2.5.1 ?


I hadnt realised this as the deployment guide states that a minimum of vCenter 6.5 which we have and am not in a position to upgrade the hosts yet

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ksram
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi @raycward 

Currently we have only one version of OVA being made available. 

You may be able to manually extract the OVA and modify the configuration. Though we haven't tested HWVersion 11, it has no hard dependency on HW version. 

-Thanks

Ram

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raycward
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi Ram

I gave it a go as expected this to be the case.

  1. I was able to extract the ovf (using 7zip)
  2. edited the ovf file and changed the to vmx-11
  3. then set a new SHA hasfile within the .mf
  4. using the ovftool generated a new ova and was able to deploy 

After powering on it didnt work

so I had to use the vm console and found the root password wasnt set as expected.

I have had this before

  1. into the grub
  2. use "passwd" to reset root
  3. reboot the appliance
  4. confirm root access
  5. /etc/systemd/network/10-static.en.network did not exist , but 10-dhcp.en.network did, so created a static file and removed the dhcp one
  6. another reboot
  7. i was then able to access via ssh
  8. the run the firstboot script
  9. rm -rf /opt/vmware-shd
  10. sh /etc/vmware/cap/cap-firstboot.sh

at this point I still cant access the web ui

running - systemctrl status shows that the 3 services are not running 

other post have suggested redeploying the appliance - which i have tried with no luck

 

any ideas how to troubleshoot and get the services running as its normally due to the root password

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raycward
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

root@photon [ ~ ]# systemctl restart vmsware-shd

Failed to restart vmsware-shd.service: Unit vmsware-shd.service not found.

root@photon [ ~ ]# systemctl restart nginx

Job for nginx.service failed because the control process exited with error code.

See "systemctl status nginx.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

root@photon [ ~ ]# systemctl status nginx.service

  • nginx.service - Nginx High-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy

   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/nginx.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)

   Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Thu 2021-07-29 08:34:45 UTC; 1min 15s ago

  Process: 13842 ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/nginx -t (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

 

Jul 29 08:34:45 photon systemd[1]: nginx.service: Service RestartSec=100ms expired, scheduling restart.

Jul 29 08:34:45 photon systemd[1]: nginx.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 5.

Jul 29 08:34:45 photon systemd[1]: Stopped Nginx High-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy.

Jul 29 08:34:45 photon systemd[1]: nginx.service: Start request repeated too quickly.

Jul 29 08:34:45 photon systemd[1]: nginx.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

Jul 29 08:34:45 photon systemd[1]: Failed to start Nginx High-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy.

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raycward
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

It clearly doesnt like vm hardware version 11

I have checked and PhotonOS 3.0 is not supported on 6.0

do you have a old OVA I can have to deploy into vmx11 and upgrade skyline via the iso ?

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Nathan99
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi, I know this thread is a little old, but did you try installing the Photon 3 seperatley into a manually created VM?

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raycward
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

As it happens I was able to force the upgrade of the hosts

Interestingly deploying to the upgraded 6.5 hosts resulted in the same issue where the UI was not available

It seems that the password I was using during the OVA deployment was not passing correctly during the boot/build process

So I suspect the other method used on the 6.0 hosts originally would have worked if I had specified a different password

Not quite sure why it objected to the password supplied at the wizard, but it did start with a "$" dollar sign - ironically this is accepted post build for both the shd-admin and root

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