Patching from vCenter Server 6.5 U3r or 6.7 U3p with a mounted ISO fails

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
Attempting to mount and use a VCSA patch ISO image to upgrade vCenter Server fails on these source versions:

• vCenter Server 6.7 U3p
• vCenter Server 6.5 U3r

Note: vCenter Server 6.5 U3s is also affected by this but does not have an upgrade path as of the date of this writing.

You may see an error similar to the following:

CD drives do not have valid patch iso.
 

Example of 6.5 VAMI error. Note that 6.7 does not indicate why it fails from the UI.

 

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 6.7.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.5.x

Cause

This is due to an upstream kernel flaw that was consumed in these two releases. This flaw caused the cdrom device to be removed as part of a previous unmount operation on the appliance, such as unmounting the previous upgrade ISO.

Resolution

This has been addressed in vCenter Server 6.7 U3q. However, it's still necessary to apply the workaround steps on your vCenter 6.7 U3p appliance before patching it to 6.7 U3q or above. A fix for this will be available in a future release of vCenter Server 6.5.

 

To work around this issue, recreate the CDROM device within the vCenter Appliance OS before mounting the iso.

1. Log in to the vCenter Server Appliance with an SSH client and root credentials
2. Execute the following command:

rm /dev/sr0; sleep 5; mknod /dev/sr0 b 11 0; chown root:cdrom /dev/sr0; chmod 660 /dev/sr0

3. You should now be able to re-mount the VCSA patch iso and restart the upgrade.