vRA 7.4 pre-check fails for patch HF13

Hey everyone, this week I had an issue while deploying patch HF13 on a greenfield vRA 7.4 environment. My precheck failed, but when you opened the “Previous PreCheck Status” everything was green.

This issue was resolved together with VMware support, so make sure that you have the same issue, before executing the steps below. Support team told me that this issue will be resolved in HF14.

Now before going to the resolution let me first share some general recommendations when your going to patch your vRA environment.

General recommendations before patching.

RTFM, yes I know, sometimes even I miss a few things. Certainly when I need to read a few pages I tend to skip a few things 🙂

1. Put your database in Asynchronous mode

2. Check your cluster status and make sure that all your components are responding.

3. TAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR VRA ENVIRONMENT. This will allow you to go back to a working state in case of issues.

4. Once you completed previous steps you’re good to start the upgrade process. Make sure that you copy over ALL 3 files to your master vRA appliance. There are 2 .sh scripts and there is 1 .zip file. (Yes you need all 3 🙂 ).

First you run the cleanup script. Watch the output of the command.
Secondly run the patchscript script.
In case of issues check the /var/log/vmware/vcac/selfpatch.log
Check the output of the command you just executed. Initially I forgot to copy over the .zip file. If I would have looked to the output of the command, I would have seen my first error.

Resolving the issue

Like I said before this was resolved by GSS so continue at your own risk. My issues started after the patch was uploaded through the VAMI interface and I executed the precheck. This was the result of the precheck.

To resolve it, connect to your master vRA appliance through a Putty session and go to /usr/lib/vcac/patches/repo/ There edit the “patch_installation_details.json” with the VI editor.

At the end of this file you will see that “isPrecheckSuccessful” is flagged as false.

Just change false to true and save the file.

Now go back to your VAMI interface and go to the tab “Rollback” or any other tab for that matter. Immediately go back to the tab “New Patch”, this will refresh the page and you will be good to go.