Lifecycle Manager plugin download fails and Lifecycle Manager is not available in vSphere Client after vCenter upgrade to 8.x

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• Lifecycle Manager item is missing from vSphere Client menu
• VMware vSphere Lifecycle Manager plugin is in failed status in Administration -> Solution -> Client Plugins
  
• In vsphere_client_virgo.log file you may see lines similar to: 

 <timestamp> [INFO ] rvice-extension-mngr-pool- com.vmware.vise.plugin.download.PluginDownloadServiceImpl         Found invalid cached plugin package: 'com.vmware.vum.client:8.0.x.<buildnumber>'. Will retry the download.
<timestamp> [ERROR] rvice-extension-mngr-pool-92 com.vmware.vise.plugin.download.PluginDownloadServiceImpl         Downloading plugin package: com.vmware.vum.client:8.0.x.<buildnumber> has failed. Cannot connect to host: https://VCENTER_FQDN:9087/vci/downloads/vum-htmlclient.zip org.apache.http.client.HttpResponseException: status code: 403, reason phrase: Forbidden

• While inspecting the content of etc/vmware/vsphere-ui/cm-service-packages/com.vmware.cis.vsphereclient.plugin , you can see file similar to:

#ls -lah /etc/vmware/vsphere-ui/cm-service-packages/com.vmware.cis.vsphereclient.plugin
 -rw-r--r-- 1 vsphere-ui users   .com.vmware.vum.client-8.0.x.<buildnumber>.incomplete

 

 

Environment

 vCenter Server 8.x

Resolution

• From a vCenter with same build, create an archive with the content of /etc/vmware/vsphere-ui/cm-service-packages/com.vmware.cis.vsphereclient.plugin/com.vmware.vum.client-8.0.x.<buildnumber>

#tar -zcvf vum-htmlclient.tar.gz  com.vmware.vum.client-8.0.x.<buildnumber>

• Copy the archive in /etc/vmware/vsphere-ui/cm-service-packages/com.vmware.cis.vsphereclient.plugin

 #cp vum-htmlclient.tar.gz /etc/vmware/vsphere-ui/cm-service-packages/com.vmware.cis.vsphereclient.plugin

• Uncompress vum-htmlclient.tar.gz

#tar -zxvf vum-htmlclient.tar.gz

• Delete .com.vmware.vum.client-8.0.x.<buildnumber>.incomplete file

rm  .com.vmware.vum.client-8.0.x.<buildnumber>.incomplete

• Restart vsphere-ui service 

#service-control --restart vsphere-ui