vLR in-place upgrade from 9.0.4.x to 9.0.5 or from 9.0.4.x to VCF Protection and Recovery 9.1 or later hangs

Products

• VMware Live Recovery

Issue/Introduction

• VLR in-place upgrade from 9.0.4.0 to 9.0.5 or from 9.0.4.x to VCF Protection and Recovery 9.1 or later hangs with error message

watchdog : BUG: soft lockup

• This issue is only observed if the VLR appliance is upgraded from 9.0.4 GA to later version like 9.0.5 or from 9.0.4.x to VCF Protection and Recovery 9.1 or later
• Error seen during Upgrade pre-check
  

  Operation Failed Failed to install update: Upgrade precheck failed. Kernel linux-6.1.147-3.ph5.x86_64 has known issue. Please check release notes for more information.

Environment

• VMware Cloud Foundation 9.x
• VMware Live Recovery 9.0.4 and hot patches
• VMware Live Recovery 9.0.5
• VCF Protection and Recovery 9.1 

Cause

• Linux kernel from v6.1.147-1.ph5 to 6.1.147-6.ph5 were affected by an infinite loop issue.
• This was an issue introduced by the upstream kernel v5.10.240 and v6.1.147 in Photon 4 and Photon 5

Resolution

Pre-requisites:

• Take a snapshot of the vLR and the vCenter Server appliances on the Protected (PR) site and the Disaster Recovery (DR) site
• If vCenter instances are running in Linked Mode, take offline snapshots to ensure consistency across both sites.
• Ensure the vLR appliances have a valid internet connection

Steps to remediate:

1. Upgrade Linux rpm on the appliance before appliance upgrade. This requires SSH to be enabled on the vLR appliance. Follow Enable SSH to enable SSH on the appliance.
   a. SSH to the vLR appliance as admin using IP or FQDN
   b. Run “su -” and provide admin password to login as root.
   c. Run "wget https://packages.broadcom.com/photon/5.0/photon_5.0_x86_64/x86_64/linux-6.1.158-7.ph5.x86_64.rpm" 
      
       Note - If internet connection is not available in the appliances, download the rpm using the URL link and transfer the file to the appliances manually.
   
   d. Run "rpm -Uvh linux-6.1.158-7.ph5.x86_64.rpm"
   e. Reboot the appliance
   
   
2. Perform in-place upgrade as usual

Additional Information

Reference: Upgrade the Linux RPM of the Protection and Recovery Appliance