Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager upgrade to 8.18 Patch 5 fails during Photon OS upgrade phase

Products

VCF Operations VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

Upgrade of Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager(LCM) from 8.18.0 Patch 1 to Patch 5, following the instructions provided here Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.18 Patch 5 Installation Runbook does not complete, and the services are not restored.
When attempting to access Aria Suite LCM, you see the following message:
In /var/log/vrlcm/os-package-update.log’ of Aria Suite LCM node, you notice the upgrade process aborted due to the following packages:

YYYY-MM-DDT05:13:20+00:00 Generating tdnf cache on Photon OS 5.0
Refreshing metadata for: 'VMWare Photon Linux ISO'
Metadata cache created.
YYYY-MM-DDT05:13:21+00:00 Finding packages in the target repo. This may take several minutes.
YYYY-MM-DDT05:13:42+00:00 Error: Packages - open-vm-tools-sdmp - are not available in the target repo for OS upgrade. Please provide the correct repo having the required packages.

Original list of RPMs and RPM DB are stored in /tmp/photon-upgrade-Ypd, please provide contents of that folder along with system journal logs for analysis; these logs can be captured using command-
# /usr/bin/journalctl -xa > /tmp/photon-upgrade-Ypd/journal.log
Cannot continue. Aborting.

Environment

Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.18.0 Patch 1

Cause

This issue occurs as the update process(i.e. Photon OS 3 to 5) could not find a suitable upgrade package for 'open-vm-tools-sdmp' installed on Aria Suite LCM.

Resolution

The package 'open-vm-tools-sdmp' is installed on VMs and appliances to enable service discovery for such objects in Aria Operations. To resolve this issue, perform the following steps:

Revert to the snapshot taken prior to the upgrade.
SSH to Aria Suite LCM node and run the following command to validate and list packages associated with 'open-vm-tools-sdmp':

rpm -qa | grep open-vm-tools-sdmp
Take a snapshot of the Aria Suite LCM node and remove the package identified in the step.1 using the following command:

rpm -ev --nodeps Package-name-from Step.2.
Initiate upgrade following instructions - Aria Suite Lifecycle 8.18 Patch 5 Installation Runbook.

After upgrading LCM, you can install the open-vm-tools-sdmp package by following the steps outlined below, which are also documented in the KB article Credential-less Service Discovery functionality in Aria Operations .

Open VM Tools (open-vm-tools) Service Discovery Plugin (sdmp) is installed and running.

Use the commands below to install the package:

For Photon OS 5:
tdnf install open-vm-tools-sdmp

After installation, restart the vmtoolsd service using the below command:
service vmtoolsd restart

VMware Tools version 11.1.0 (using ss), 11.1.5, 11.2.0 or above for Linux VMs.
VMware Tools version 11.1.0 or above for Windows VMs.
vCenter version = 6.7u3g and above
ESXi version = 6.7p2, or 7.0 and above
VM hardware version = 9 or above
vCenter user that is used to configure the SDMP adapter instance has the following Virtual Machine privileges under the Service configuration section:

key: VirtualMachine.Namespace.Management, Localization: Service Configuration -> Manage service configurations
   key: VirtualMachine.Namespace.Query, Localization: Service Configuration -> Query service configurations
   key: VirtualMachine.Namespace.ModifyContent, Localization: Service Configuration -> Modify service configuration
   key: VirtualMachine.Namespace.ReadContent, Localization: Service Configuration -> Read service configuration