“Check compliance with Image” task completes in SDDC Manager, but fails to start in vCenter

Products

• VMware SDDC Manager / VCF Installer

Issue/Introduction

• After starting a cluster remediation in SDDC Manager, the hosts do not enter Maintenance Mode and the remediation does not start in vCenter.
• After manually placing a host in Maintenance Mode and then performing the update only on the host, the update completes.

Environment

• SDDC Manager 5.2.1

Cause

This behavior may occur when the "parallelRemediationEnabled" setting is set to 'true'.

In such cases, the remediation task may complete without any errors. However, hosts not already in Maintenance Mode will be skipped during the remediation process.

Resolution

To address this issue, the following options are available:

Option 1: Disable parallel remediation by setting parallelRemediationEnabled to false. 

Note: Disabling the "parallelRemediation" option within the remediation settings triggers a standard remediation workflow where hosts are automatically placed into maintenance mode and then remediated sequentially. 

1. Steps to check Global Lifecycle manager settings for parallel remediation:

• • Navigate to the Lifecycle Manager UI using the top-left ellipsis menu.
  • Select "Settings".
  • Under "Cluster Lifecycle" select "Images".
  • Check the parallel remediation settings. 

Note: Global vLCM settings are applicable for all vLCM clusters. Disabling the option here, will disable this setting on all clusters. However, these settings can be overridden individually on a per cluster basis.

2. Steps to disable global vLCM settings that are applicable to all clusters. Please validate the settings on each cluster:

• • Navigate to cluster using the Inventory view.
  • Navigate to Updates tab.
  • Select the Image section.
  • Select the ellipsis besides "Check Compliance" button.
  • Select the Edit Remediation Settings.
  • Uncheck the Parallel remediation settings.
  • Change the number of tries from 1 to 3.

Option 2: Manually place the hosts into maintenance mode before starting the remediation.

After performing the changes above, the remediation was successful.

Additional Information

Improved messaging and notifications regarding this behavior have been implemented in VCF 9.x.

Related issue: Remediation task using vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vlcm) of hosts in the cluster completes without patching the hosts