Cannot upgrade from Site Recovery Manager 8.7 to version 8.8 or above.

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

The administrator is experiencing an issue upgrading the Site Recovery Manager appliances from version 8.7 to versions 8.8, 9.0, or 9.0.2. Currently, the appliance does not recognize the attached ISO, despite the administrator having tried four different ISOs to date.

Entries similar to the below image can be found in /opt/vmware/var/log/vami/updatecli.log

Environment

Live Site Recovery 8.7

Cause

The following RPM packages were present in Photon 3 but have been deprecated and removed in Photon 4. Since newer Photon versions no longer reference these packages, the upgrade fails when they are detected:

util-linux = 2.32.1-5.ph3 and zlib = 1.2.11-5.ph3

Resolution

• It is important to revert to the previous snapshot following a failed upgrade.
• Reverting ensures that any incomplete or corrupted changes made during the failed upgrade are undone, preventing potential data loss or system errors and enabling you to troubleshoot or attempt the upgrade again from a clean baseline.
• This issue can be resolved by upgrading the vSphere Replication appliance to version 8.8.0.3 (build 23263438), which will automatically uninstall the old, stale RPM packages.