Error "Firstboot failed" on the console when upgrading Aria Operations

Products

• VMware Aria Operations 8.x

Issue/Introduction

During an upgrade of Aria Operations, the VMs are rebooted. After the reboot, the console of the VM shows the below 'Firstboot failed' error and the GUI(both /ui and /admin) becomes inaccessible.




Firstboot failed
Please see the log files in the following directory
/var/log/firstboot/

Environment

Aria Operations 8.x upgrading to 8.18.x

Cause

• When non-ASCII characters are present, the merge process fails, causing some essential information required during the upgrade to become missing.
  This results in a misconfiguration of the upgrade and it will fail to proceed after the first reboot.
• Upgrades can fail if the browser language is set to non English.

Resolution

• Change the browser to English before starting the upgrade.
• If you take the cluster offline before upgrading, enter the Offline Reason in English.

Additional Information

Japanese version: Aria Operations のアップグレードが失敗し、コンソールには「firstboot failed」が表示される。