During the update of vSAN Witness host, the files cannot be downloaded to the host

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

When upgrading a vSAN Witness Host, you might get an error message that states:

Host cannot download files from VMware vSphere Lifecycle Manager patch store. Check the network connectivity and firewall setup

 

Looking into the Witness appliance esxupdate.log we see these:

2024-10-22T17:39:01Z esxupdate: 48714833: downloader: INFO: Downloading http://VC-FQDN:9084/vum/repository/hostupdate/vmw/metadata-123.zip to /tmp/tmpabc_x

2024-10-22T17:39:34Z esxupdate: 48714833: downloader: WARNING: Download failed: <urlopen error timed out>, 4 retry left...

2024-10-22T17:40:07Z esxupdate: 48714833: downloader: WARNING: Download failed: <urlopen error timed out>, 3 retry left...

2024-10-22T17:40:40Z esxupdate: 48714833: downloader: WARNING: Download failed: <urlopen error timed out>, 2 retry left...

2024-10-22T17:41:13Z esxupdate: 48714833: downloader: WARNING: Download failed: <urlopen error timed out>, 1 retry left...

2024-10-22T17:41:43Z esxupdate: 48714833: esxupdate: ERROR: An esxupdate error exception was caught:

Environment

7.x 8.x

Resolution

The reason we are seeing this issue is because port 9084 is blocked between ESXi host and vCenter server.

For a complete list of ports, follow this document:

https://ports.esp.vmware.com/home/vSphere