VCSA ISO marked as corrupt on extraction when sheep-dipping ISO

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Using sheep-dip tools such as Opswat, which utilises 7-zip, to unpack and scan files in VCSA-all ISOs fails on file:

VMware-VCSA-all-8.0.#-########.iso/migration-assistant\VMware-python.msi/product.cab/recursion.tar

The failure is that recursion.tar is unable to be extracted cleanly

Using 7-zip to inspect the ISO manually and attempt to extract recursion.tar fails with "Unexpected end of data"

MD5 hash and SHA256 hash of the ISO matches what's present on the download page of Broadcom Support Portal

Environment

VCSA 8.0.x ISO

Cause

recursion.tar is a test file which comes bundled with Python. It's a purposeful invalid tar archive to test that code won't end up in an infinite loop when working with invalid archives and is part of the official Python installation on Windows.

More information can be found on the python bug tracker

And the commit here on github

Resolution

As recursion.tar is bundled with Python; this is expected behaviour.

Furthermore, unless moving from a 6.x Windows vCenter to a 7.0/8.0 vCenter Appliance, Migration Assistant in the ISO is not utilised during installation, patching, upgrading or restoring a VCSA.