Sunday, June 24, 2018

ESXi upgrade, ValueError: Cannot merge VIBs...

Recently while upgrading one of the VMhost from ESXi 6.0 U2 to U3 using VMware update manager, one of my colleague first encountered following error during remediation,

“Cannot execute upgrade script on host”

And when he tried to upgrade the VMhost by manually booting it up using the HPE custom ESXi 6.0 U3 image, he got stuck with following error,


On checking /var/log/vua.log file on host, found similar entries there.

Here it looks like the Intel_bootbak_intelcim_provider_0.5-3.3 has been released more than once, with different sizes.

So, here to fix this upgrade issue we need to remove the conflicting intelcim_provider vib. Before trying to remove it, make sure the CIM Server service is in stopped state otherwise you would get an error like, "Can't remove....device or resource busy" while trying to remove it.

Sometimes it may look like in Stopped state however as set to Start and Stop with Host, you would get an error when try to remove it. In such case, set this Service to start and Stop manually and once done, then you would be able to remove the intelcim_provider vib.

Refer to following screenshots for steps about how to Stop the CIM Server service or change its Startup type.


Now, you can remove the conflicting vib using the following cmd after connecting to host over ssh using putty:

esxcli software vib remove -n intelcim-provider  (A reboot may be required, check the cmd output reboot required parameter value)

Once done now you can re-run the ESXi upgrade again and hopefully this time it will get through as well as install the correct version of intelcim-provider.

Note: Don't forget to change the Startup type of CIM Server service post ESXi upgared/host reboot.

That's it... :)