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barrycuda72
Contributor
Contributor

Upgrade Failing from 3.5

I have several HPDL380 G5 servers running 3.5 ESX. We have VCenter running on Windows 2003 server

We were able to get our Vcenter server upgraded to version 4 but when ever we try to upgrade our host it fails.

We have tried the Update Manager and the Upgrade Client.

It gets so far then pops up and error "Cannot complete upgrade. Host is rolled back to the previous version"

Any thoughts? Is there any other log file that I can look at that will give me a better idea of what is going on?

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

Have you enabled VT in BIOS?

Can you connect to the console during upgrade (for example using ILOE) to see where the upgrade fails?

I got a similar problem caused by a custom user in /etc/passwd.

I've removed the user to make the upgrade.

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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cacois
Contributor
Contributor

I've been unable to update hosts using the Update Manager, but have been able to using the Host Update Utility. However, even in that case, I had to run the update 2 or 3 times on a given host before it would return success. How far is your update getting before failing when using the Host Update Utility?

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

I've used update only for testing and lab environment (and usual works).

On a production environment I prefer do a reinstallation (at least of ESX hosts).

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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barrycuda72
Contributor
Contributor

Here is how we got this resolved. The issue was that we had a local user configured on the host. This local user did not have a valid home directory, it was part of a monitoring package so it did not need a home dir. When we watched the console during the upgrade when it tried to convert the users it would bomb on this entry. Vmware support confirmed that this was the problem the users home directory had to be /home or it would not work. We no longer needed this local user so we deleted it from the system and the upgrade using the Update Manager went without a hitch.

Thanks

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