Today I wanted to patch my vCenter installation due to the newly released advisory VMSA-2021-0010. As always I logged in to my vCenter’s VAMI webinterface, but I noticed that the “stage” and “stage and install” buttons where greyed out.
It seems that this can happen due to a corruption on the update DB which can be caused by previous updates that where not fully executed as it should.
If you encounter this issue you have 2 options:
- Update using CLI. In my case this still seemed to work
- Clear some files, which makes the normal update process via webui available again.
You have to log in to your VCSA appliance using a credential that has shell access. Once that you logged in, and switched to the bash shell you can execute these commands:
rm -rf /storage/core/software-update/updates
rm -rf /storage/updatemgr/software-*
rm /etc/applmgmt/appliance/software_update_state.conf
rm /storage/db/patching.db*
rm -r /storage/core/software-update/*
Once executed, if you go back to the VAMI update page, the stage and install buttons will be active again.
Happy Patching!