Upgrade Aria Operations failed with the error "firstboot failed" on the console.

Products

• VMware Aria Operations 8.x

Issue/Introduction

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




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

Environment

This issue can be seen when upgrading Aria operations from 8.14 to 8.18 or from 8.17 to 8.18.
There is possibility of the upgrade from/to the other versions.

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 misconfigured file during the upgrade process.

Resolution

A workaround is to use English in the offline reason.