Last week, as I was applying the latest security patches to a quartet of virtual appliances that were previously running 6.5.0.30000, I ran into a strange issue. The update to 6.5.0.30100 ran without a hitch on my PSC, but it failed on my vCSA appliance. The progress window disappeared from view, and after 10 minutes of patiently waiting, I took the plunge and rebooted the VM.
Yes, it's possible that I interrupted something important with that reboot. But in all of the updates I've pushed out over the years, it's not common for the progress window to just go away and not provide any feedback on the status of the update operation.
After the reboot, vCenter was up and running ok, albeit on the .30000 version. After doing some checks to make sure I didn't need to revert to a snapshot (always take a snapshot), I decided to log back into the VAMI and try it again.
Except the VAMI was down.
Some head-scratching ensued. But after a few minutes of panic, I realized that it's an easy fix. Here's what to do:
- Log into your virtual appliance's console (easy to do if vCenter is still functional. If not, just log into the host directly. Good reminder that you should record the hostname for your vCSA before you start this type of task.)
- The process that is responsible for that nice VAMI interface is named vami-lighttp. It's probably not running, which you can confirm with a quick ps -ef | grep vami-lighttp.
- Start the process by issuing this command: /etc/init.d/vami-lighttp start.
- Verify that your VAMI is back online.
Now you can log back into the VAMI and re-run that update.