vSAN file services upgrade fails with error: "Failed to upload the selected OVF files"

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

When trying to upgrade vSAN FileServices, the upgrade fails with the error : Failed to upload the selected OVF files

Environment

VMware vSAN 7.x

VMware vSAN 8.x

Cause

• No Internet access on the vCenter Server
• The OVF files to be used for upgrade are failing to be saved on the vCenter under the path "/storage/updatemgr/vsan/fileService"

Resolution

Follow the below steps to manually upload the OVF files to the vCenter Server :

1. Download all the OVF files manually from https://support.broadcom.com website.

The downloaded files should contain 6 files in total as in below screenshot :

Make a note of ovf build version here. In the above example the ovf build version is 24674464.

2. SSH into the vCenter Server and navigate to the directory: /storage/updatemgr/vsan/fileService
3. Make a new directory with name ovf-<vCenter version>-<vCenter build version>

eg: mkdir ovf-8.0.3.1000-24280767

Note : Check if the vcenter build version and ovf build version(from step 1) are the same. If they are not same, then the directory name should be changed to the following format : ovf-<vCenter version>-<OVF build version>
For example -> If the vcenter build version is 24280767 and OVF build version is 24674464(as in step1), then we should create a folder in /storage/updatemgr/vsan/fileService as "ovf-8.0.3.1000-24674464"

4. Use winscp to copy all 6 OVF files to the newly created directory: /storage/updatemgr/vsan/fileService/ovf-8.0.3.1000-xxxxxxxx

5. Change file ownership of the files in the folder 'ovf-8.0.3.1000-xxxxxxxx'.

Files in folder 'ovf-8.0.3.1000-xxxxxxxx' will have ownership root:root. Change the ownership of all the files from "root:root" to "vsan-health:users" using the following command :

chown vsan-health:users <Name of OVF File> ----> Execute this for all the 6 files in the folder

Note : If the ownership of the files is not set correctly then there are chances that the upgrade might fail with the error message : A general system error occurred TypeError: expected str, bytes or os.PathLike object, not NoneType

6. Execute command 'vmon-cli -r vsan-health' to restart the vsan-health service
7. Re-login to the vCenter Web Client and try to upgrade the file service using first option: Use current OVF where a new version of the file service to be upgraded will be listed.

8. The File service should be updated successfully.