Migrating to vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 Update 2 fails during vCenter Orchestrator installation

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

This article provides step to work around the issue when migrating of vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 Update 2 fails.

Symptoms:

• The source vCenter Server database also contains the vCenter Orchestrator database.
• You see the error:
  
  PostgreSQL firstboot failure
  
  
• In the /var/log/firstboot/firstbootStatus.json log file, you see entries similar to:
  
  {
  "totalSteps": 29,
  "stepsCompleted": 15,
  "stepsStarted": 15,
  "finalStatus": "failure",
  "failedSteps": "vpostgres-firstboot",
  "stepsCompletedList": "visl-support-firstboot,vmafd-firstboot,rhttpproxy_firstboot,vmidentity-firstboot,soluser_firstboot,cmfirstboot,license_firstboot,psc_firstboot,scafirstboot,vapi_firstboot,vws_firstboot,mgmt-firstboot,netdump-firstboot,vmware-syslog-firstboot,vpostgres-firstboot"
  
  
• In the /var/log/firstboot/vpostgres-firstboot.py_13193_stderr.log file, you see entries similar to:
  
  2016-09-29T14:12:02.333Z Upgrade import step failed
  2016-09-29T14:12:02.333Z vPostgres firstboot(action=firstboot) failed
  
  
• In the /var/log/firstboot/firstbootInfrastructure.log file, you see entries similar to:
  
  2016-09-29T14:12:02.351Z INFO firstbootInfrastructure [Failed] /usr/lib/vmware-vpostgres/firstboot/vpostgres-firstboot.py is complete
  2016-09-29T14:12:02.355Z INFO firstbootInfrastructure No localized error detail found in /var/log/firstboot/vpostgres-firstboot.py_13193_stderr.log, assuming internal error
  2016-09-29T14:12:02.357Z WARNING firstbootInfrastructure Bug component info file does not exist
  2016-09-29T14:12:02.357Z INFO firstbootInfrastructure Firstboot duration: 371 sec
  2016-09-29T14:12:02.358Z INFO firstbootInfrastructure First boot is a failure
  2016-09-29T14:12:02.358Z WARNING firstbootInfrastructure stopping status aggregation...
  
  
• In the /var/log/vmware/vpxd/vcdb_import.err log file, you see entries similar to:
  
  Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/vmware/cis_upgrade_runner/payload/component-scripts/vcdb/ms2pg/sqlite2pg.py", line 161, in <module>
  [ti[0] for ti in ci]):
  File "/opt/vmware/lib/python2.7/multiprocessing/pool.py", line 659, in next
  raise value
  psycopg2.ProgrammingError: INSERT has more expressions than target columns
  LINE 1: ...7442494f534f7074696f6e733d300d0a0d0a0d0a'::bytea,NULL,NULL);
  
  Note: This log excerpt is an example. Date, time, and environmental variables may vary depending on your environment.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 5.5.x

Cause

This issue occurs due to different release cycles of vCenter Orchestrator and vCenter Server.

Resolution

This is a known issue affecting vCenter Server 5.5 migrations to 6.0 Update 2.

Currently, there is no resolution.

To work around this issue, prevent the vCenter Orchestrator data from migrating on the source vCenter Server by changing the table structure of the VMO_ResourceElementContent table.

Caution: Ensure to backup the vCenter Server database before proceeding with the steps.

1. Connect to the vCenter Server database using the same user the vCenter Server uses for the database connection.
2. Run this query:
   
   ALTER TABLE VMO_RESOURCEELEMENTCONTENT DROP COLUMN CHECKSUM;