Wednesday 30 December 2015

" Internal Error: Unexpected error code: -1. " During SRM upgrade to 5.5.1

I have been involved in an SRM upgrade from version 5.1 to 5.5 and I faced this issue during the upgrade, hope this information helps anyone who is currently planning on upgrading their SRM infrastructure to 5.5.

Background: One of our customer had an vSphere 5.1 setup along with their SRM on 5.1 and they requested that the setup be upgrade to 5.5. So, I started off with the upgrade as below:

Primary Site upgrade:
1) Upgrade vCenter from version 5.1 to 5.5 U3, everything went fine.
2) Upgrade SRM from version 5.1 to 5.5.1 build 2653439, during the upgrade after the screen where we enter the details of the vCenter(Figure1) the below error message appeared. " Internal Error: Unexpected error code: -1." ( Figure 2). 

Figure 1: Enter vCenter Credentials.

Figure 2: Error during SRM upgrade.

3) The SRM Installer log file " VMSrminst.log" located in the %temp% folder shows the below message:
VMware: Srm::Installation::DirectoryChanger::~DirectoryChanger: INFORMATION: Restored directory. Directory=C:\Windows\system32
VMware: Srm::Installation::Credentials::ProbeUser: INFORMATION: ProbeUser returns: -1
VMware: Srm::Installation::Utility::GetMsgFromErrorTable: INFORMATION: Error message is Internal error: unexpected error code: %d.
VMware: Srm::Installation::Credentials::ValidateVc: ERROR: Internal error: unexpected error code: -1.
VMware: Srm::Installation::VMValidateVc: WARNING: Failed to validate credentials or VC version.
4) The release notes got me off track as it stated the below, and more importantly the 1647061 build is not available for download anymore. :-(
VMware SRM Release Notes. " To upgrade an existing SRM 5.0.x or 5.1.x installation to SRM 5.5.1, download and run the installer VMware-srm-5.5.1-1647061.exe"
5) So, we opened a ticket with VMware in hopes of getting the 1647061 build of SRM installer.


Resolution: 1) After some basic troubleshooting with the VMware engineer, he realized that all the setting were in place and that the error was because of some actual issue. He then referenced some internal KB article and searched  for some SSL errors in the logs, when I saw those errors my First question was " Hold on: Is that because SSLv3 is disabled in vCenter 5.5 U3" and guess what I was right :-) ,he than informed me that the issue was due the fact that SSLv3 is disabled by default in vCenter 5.5U3 and that SRM still needs SSLv3 to work with vCenter.

2) The solution was to enable SSLv3 on the vCenter as there is currently no fix for SRM to work without SSLv3 while communicating with vCenter.  You can follow the below kb article, the part which suggests the step to enable SSLv3 on the vpxd.cfg file did the trick. I noticed one more thing, when you add the below option " <sslOptions>16924672</sslOptions> " ensure that "Options" is with a capital O. I tried the options as stated in the step 3 of the KB article and it did not work. :-)


4) Once the entry was added and the VPXD service was restarted the Upgrade went like butter on bread... :-) . I just wish that the information was available earlier and that it would have saved a day or two during the upgrade... Hope this information helps....

XX

3 comments:

trot63 said...

Thanks for posting this. This helped out during an upgrade and saved me hours of troubleshooting..

trot63 said...

Thanks a ton for posting this! This just saved a ton of grief and hours of troubleshooting.

Unknown said...

excellent post, found after 1 day of head scratching, might have been nice if they had released a patch for this.