Upgrading vRA or vRO to newer versions may fail if there are certain records in the known_hosts file of the virtual appliance

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• As of vRA and vRO 8.11.2, new SSH config and keys have been introduced.
• The /<home>/.ssh/known_hosts (/home/root/.ssh/known_hosts) file may contain records with old SSH keys which may interfere with the new keys preventing upgrade utilities from connecting to the cluster nodes during an upgrade to a version above vRA/vRO 8.11.2.
• The offending records in this file are all the keys starting with the IP address of any node in the cluster.

Environment

VMware Aria Automation Config 8.12.x

Cause

SSH connections to cluster nodes performed by the upgrade utilities fails, if there are offending records in the /<home>/.ssh/known_hosts file, for any of the vRA/vRO cluster nodes, because the SSH connection could not be created. The upgrade fails early within the preparatory steps of the upgrade.

Resolution

VMware is aware of this issue and is being considered for inclusion in a later release.

See the Workaround section below for additional information.

Workaround:

1. Prior to the upgrade, validate if the following files are present on any node in the cluster.

ls -l ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
ls -l ~/.ssh/known_hosts

2.  If they are present, remove these files from each node in the cluster before starting the upgrade.

rm ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
rm ~/.ssh/known_hosts