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

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

This issue can be seen when upgrading Aria operations from 8.14 to 8.18 or from 8.17 to 8.18.
Aria Operations 8.16.1 to 8.18.3

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.
• Do not take the cluster offline before beginning the upgrade.
  • If you do take the cluster offline ensure to 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。