HCX Manager upgrade failing "Error fetching public key from file"

Products

• VMware HCX

Issue/Introduction

• HCX Manager upgrade from the hybridity page (port 443) System -> Administration -> System Updates failed with the following error: "Error fetching public key from file, cannot proceed to validate the signed bundle"
  
  

 

• On the HCX Admin Page at port 9443,  Administration > Upgrade > UPGRADE > Choose File. The upgrade fails with the following error:

 

• Below errors were noticed on appliance-management.log under /common/logs/appliance-management/ :

2024-07-26 05:35:59.280 UTC [https-jsse-nio-9443-exec-8, , ] WARN  c.g.jsonrpc4j.JsonRpcBasicServer- Error in JSON-RPC Service
java.lang.RuntimeException: Error fetching key from file , cannot proceed to validate the signed bundle

The correct download files were present under /common/tmp/upgrade/download. 

[/common/tmp/upgrade/download ]$ ls -ltrh
total 4.1G
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin root 4.1G Feb  4 19:30 VMware-HCX-Cloud-upgrade-bundle-4.8.2.0-23247145.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 admin root 2.0K Feb  4 19:34 VMware-HCX-Cloud-upgrade-bundle-4.8.2.0-23247145.tar.gz.sha256.sig

The files under /common/ks show that the file ovf_klnext.public is 0 KB.

Environment

VMware HCX

Cause

Issue was due to the file "ovf_klnext.public" being bad or invalid.

Resolution

Take a backup from HCX Admin page(port 9443) and create a snapshot of the HCX Manager VM from vCenter.
Copy the file ovf_klnext.public from a working HCX Manager to the /common/ks/ directory of the affected HCX Manager.
On the HCX Admin Page at port 9443, navigate to Administration > Upgrade > UPGRADE > Choose File, and then retry the upgrade.

Additional Information

HCX upgrade bundle can be downloaded from the Broadcom Support Portal. Next to your profile on top right, click the dropdown and go to VMware Cloud Foundation -> My Downloads -> VMware HCX
Reference: Download Broadcom products and software