vSphere Replication vib installation errors on ESXi hosts "/usr/sbin/esxupdate returned with exit status: 7"

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

After upgrading vCenter to version 8.0U2 and Live Site Recovery to 9.0.2, there are errors in vCenter about '/usr/sbin/esxupdate returned with exit status: 7' and SSLException, trying to connect to a Host in another cluster that is not part of the replication cluster.

Communication for this cluster cannot be opened to vSphere Replication.

Environment

vSphere Replication (All versions)

Cause

The vSphere Replication appliances will attempt to install a vib on all ESXi hosts in the vCenter inventory by design.

Resolution

Ideally, we want network communication open between all ESXi hosts in the vCenter inventory and vSphere Replication. In the event this is not possible for one or multiple clusters, the error can be safely ignored or you can disable the automatic install. If replication traffic encryption is not used, we can change hms-auto-install-hbragent-vib to false in hms-configuration.xml and restart hms service. Then hms will not push the vib to ESXi.

Resolution:

1. SSH to the vSphere Replication appliance:


Edit 'hms-configuration.xml' using vi and update the 'hms-auto-install-hbragent-vib' entry from true to false.

<! -- Whether to install hbragent vib automatically when reconnecting to the hosts -->
<hms-auto-install-hbragent-vib>true</hms-auto-install-hbragent-vib>

        NOTE:  When vSphere replication is upgraded the vib will need to be manually installed on the hosts that are used for replication or set this back to true while it installs the vibs.


2. Restart HMS by running the command: systemctl restart hms