During SDDC-M restore from backup file, if the SDDC Manager instance was initially upgraded from 5.x to 9.0.x, the restore operation fails at the sub-task RestoreSDDCManagerConfiguration with error 'Restore operation failed for SDDC Configuration'

Products

• VMware SDDC Manager
• VMware Cloud Foundation

Issue/Introduction

If SDDC Manager is upgraded from 5.x to 9.0.x, restoring from file-based backup fails, because the restore-configuration.sh scripts attempts to recover the feature.properties file from a relative path, rather than the absolute path.

The following error appears in /var/log/vmware/vcf/sddc-support.log:

2025-09-08T09:04:17.227+0000 INFO [vcf_sos] [commandutils.py::execute_cmd_locally::228::restore-f3d9dd76-b690-48d9-9a08-279535a73770] b'Restoring file /home/vcf/feature.properties\n'
2025-09-08T09:04:17.236+0000 INFO [vcf_sos] [commandutils.py::execute_cmd_locally::228::restore-f3d9dd76-b690-48d9-9a08-279535a73770] b'sending incremental file list\n'
2025-09-08T09:04:17.358+0000 INFO [vcf_sos] [commandutils.py::execute_cmd_locally::228::restore-f3d9dd76-b690-48d9-9a08-279535a73770] b'\n'
2025-09-08T09:04:17.359+0000 INFO [vcf_sos] [commandutils.py::execute_cmd_locally::228::restore-f3d9dd76-b690-48d9-9a08-279535a73770] b'sent 19 bytes  received 12 bytes  62.00 bytes/sec\n'
2025-09-08T09:04:17.359+0000 INFO [vcf_sos] [commandutils.py::execute_cmd_locally::228::restore-f3d9dd76-b690-48d9-9a08-279535a73770] b'total size is 0  speedup is 0.00\n'
2025-09-08T09:04:17.362+0000 ERROR [vcf_sos] [commandutils.py::execute_cmd_locally::235::restore-f3d9dd76-b690-48d9-9a08-279535a73770] b'rsync: [sender] change_dir "/var/log/vmware/vcf/sddc-support/backup-2025-09-08-09-03-12-5816/vcf-backup-####-#######-########-######-2025-09-08-08-34-17/configuration/home/vcf" failed: No such file or directory (2)\n'

Environment

SDDC-Manager 9.0.x

Resolution

Workaround:

1. Power off the current SDDC-M appliance. Deploy a fresh SDDC Manager appliance using the OVA file and start the SDDC-M Restore process again.
2. Perform the usual pre-restore steps: Power on the newly deployed SDDC Manager appliance, copy the encrypted backup file to the /tmp folder, and generate an authentication token.
3. Before invoking the SDDC-M Restore API, SSH into the new SDDC-M appliance as the root user and run the following command (this updates restore-configuration.sh and creates a backup of the original file as restore-configuration.sh.bak):
   
   sed -i.bak -e 's|\[ ! -e "\$file" \]|[ ! -e "$base_directory$file" ]|' -e 's|\[ ! -d "\$dir" \]|[ ! -d "$base_directory$dir" ]|' /opt/vmware/sddc-support/scripts/restore-configuration.sh
   
   
4. Run the SDDC-M Restore API and proceed with the remaining steps as usual.

Additional Information

PR# 3578906