vdp 5.5
i ran into problems with the VDP 5.1 to 5.5 upgrade. i had the 5.5 iso mounted on the appliance and the upgrade was in process. everything appeared to be going well…
the upgrade mentions that it can take several hours to complete which i actually thought was an exaggeration. i left the process running at approx. 6:00pm and checked back a little later after 8:00pm. when i logged in to check the upgrade status i was surprised to see VDP backup jobs running in vcenter. i found it pretty strange yet figured it could be possible the appliance was rebooted after the upgrade had finished. i went to the vdp-configure URL to check things out and found that the upgrade had actually stalled, most likely caused by the backup jobs kicking off. so mistake on my part…i’ve just gotten used to installs automatically stopping services/jobs.
my initial reaction was to just try the upgrade again, but the vmware recommendation was to roll back with the snapshots. you’re forced to create snapshots for the appliance prior to the upgrade. here’s mistake number 2 on my part. i assumed that disk1 was the only important disk for the VDP appliance. so i only snapped disk1…the VDP manual states that you need to turn off independent mode for _all_ of the VDP appliance disks and then create a snapshot…so i couldn’t do a clean rollback. i kept messing with trying to reapply the 5.5 upgrade and eventually got it to take. i was thinking whew disaster averted…
the VDP plugin was visible in the web client. “vdp-configure” showed all services started. however, when i went to connect to the appliance from the web client there were no VDP appliances listed. the drop down list was simply blank. i tried rebooting the appliance and reregistering the appliance with vcenter. no change. i eventually gave up and decided to just get rid of the botched VDP install and start fresh with a clean install of 5.5. i deleted the VDP appliance and then followed the instructions to remove the VDP related plugins: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2038356 and http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1025360.
even after a fresh install of VDP 5.5 the issue persisted. at this point i contacted vmware support. the VDP support guys were stumped because everything looked healthy (which is what i was observing as well). a VDP support person decided the issue must be on the vcenter side of things and transferred me over to vcenter support. after describing the issue to the new support person they decided it would be best to uninstall and reinstall the vsphere web client on the vcenter server. after the web client was uninstalled the old install folder was renamed (c:\programdata\vmware\vsphere web client) and then the product was reinstalled.
i cannot recall if it was necessary to reregister VDP with vcenter once more after the install completed, but the reinstall did resolve the issue.
final advice – i became complacent with doing appliance upgrades via isos because i’ve done quite a few and it’s a simple process. there haven’t been any issues up until this. VDP is a different kind of animal and deserves full attention and thorough reading of the documentation.
vdp 5.5 addendum (6/2/2016):
i still had vdp 5.5.x running at a DR site and was surprised that i could not get to the vdp-configure URL today. i could ping the appliance IP fine but i could not access the page no matter what browser i tried – chrome, IE, firefox. an appliance reboot did not help matters. i eventually found out this was due to the popular web browsers removing support for DSA ciphers. the strange thing in this case is usually that problem is fairly obvious with other products, but in this case the reported errors made it seem like a connectivity issue or that a web service was not running.
source: https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2111900