Failed Aria Automation Upgrade Prep

I went to upgrade Aria Automation from 8.18 to 8.18.1 in my lab the other day and got blocked by an error I hadn't seen before and unfortunately, LCM and a KB search didn't provide much in the way of help. I decided to check and see what information the command line might have for me. After SSHing in and utilizing the command vracli upgrade status --details to find out the status of the ugprade, I got an error message about it being failed. I figured I would try to upgrade it manually from the CLI:

I'm not going to lie and tell you that I knew exactly what this meant. I searched public KBs, internal KBs, internal Google Chat, everything but asking around to see if other's have encountered this. After what felt like lots of taking the same actions (or searches) and expecting different results, I stumbled on a log file which was posted in an Google Chat, which referenced the staging of upgrade files in /var/vmware/prelude on the appliance.

Low and behold - when I checked that directory, there were staged files there, which quickly took me back to a recent attempt to do an upgrade, only to have it failed because etcd had crashed, pulling down Kubernetes and Aria Automation. Unfortunately, for me after restarting Aria Automation, I never returned to upgrade and was left with some stale files from that attempt.

After deleting the folder /var/vmware/prelude/upgrade, I was able to execute the upgrade prep and the upgrade!

A word of caution: I upgraded my lab using the CLI, which I wouldn't recommend. Please use Aria Suite Life Cycle Manager to upgrade Aria Automation. Not only does it ensure you are doing it correctly, it will take a consistent snapshot of your cluster, perform a number of safety and sanity checks. When you upgrade via the command line - none of that happens, and you reduce your odds of success!