Fix your VCSA 6.5 upgrade if it fails with vix error

You may have read my post yesterday regarding upgrading your VCSA 6.0 U2 appliance to 6.5 GA and how easy it is.  Everything had gone great in my testing as well as with the environment I had upgraded in order to write that article.  However, I went to upgrade another environment this evening and encountered the following error message at the top of the VCSA upgrade screen:

A problem occurred while getting data from the source vCenter Server.

That’s all it said – hopefully VMware will trap this error a little better in the future.  The installer allows you to dump a log file out named, for instance, installer-20161115-213709817.log.  Opening that log doesn’t yield a whole lot of useful information:

2016-11-16T02:42:14.629Z – debug: initiateFileTransferFromGuest error: ServerFaultCode: A general system error occurred: vix error codes = (1, 4294967290).

2016-11-16T02:42:14.630Z – debug: Failed to get fileTransferInfo:ServerFaultCode: A general system error occurred: vix error codes = (1, 4294967290).

2016-11-16T02:42:14.630Z – debug: Failed to get url of file in guest vm:ServerFaultCode: A general system error occurred: vix error codes = (1, 4294967290).

2016-11-16T02:42:14.631Z – error: Error in getting fileData for nodeType. Error: ServerFaultCode: A general system error occurred: vix error codes = (1, 4294967290).

2016-11-16T02:42:14.631Z – error: Failed to read the nodetype, Error: A general system error occurred: vix error codes = (1, 4294967290).

2016-11-16T02:42:14.631Z – error: sourcePrecheck: error in getting source Info: ServerFaultCode: A general system error occurred: vix error codes = (1, 4294967290).

Pretty generic unfortunately.  I spent some time searching the (still very new) documentation and didn’t come up with anything.  I found a thread on the VMware community forums and found another user with the same issue.  Turns out, he reset his source VCSA appliance root password and that was that.

After resetting my source VCSA root password I was able to retry the install and moved along without issue.  Perfect!  I wish the error out of the VCSA upgrade process would have reported some issue with the root credentials of the appliance, but hey, this thing is still pretty new.

Hope this helps!

 

Author: Jon

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16 Comments

  1. Thanx, Jon !

    Hint to reset vCenter root password helped me too.
    For enyone reading this, password can be changed like this.

    PUTTY and login to vCenter using
    root/
    then start
    shell
    and change password using command
    passwd

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  2. Thank you so much! This was driving me insane. I find it astounding that VMWare doesn’t have a support document addressing this issue. I was on the verge of building a whole new vcsa server.

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  3. Worked perfectly here too. Thanks for sharing!

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  4. Thanks worked for me also

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  5. Awesome! This resolved my issue as well!

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  6. MAN! You are REALLY MAN!!! Thanks!!!

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  7. Do you have directions on how to reset the root password. I’m facing this exact issue.

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    • I had the exact same issue. Open a console into your vCenter appliance box, and you can hit F2 and reset the password.

      For me, my SSO password was the same as my VCSA password, that might have had something to do with it.

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      • Oh that’s interesting we are the same way as well. I will try to change it to something else.

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      • Same here. This worked perfectly.

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      • Ditto. Worked like a charm!

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      • what do you mean hit F2 and reset the password, when I hit F2 the letter B shows up on the command line? And the only other way I found to reset the password is to reboot the vcenter and then hit the “e” key upon reboot, however when I reboot the vcenter appliance, because it’s on one of my vm hosts, i lose connection to everything until vsphere comes back up.

        Does anyone know the command line to reset the root password for vcenter

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