This was an error message appeared on the VMware vCenter Server 6.5 Update Manager while one of my friends was patching an ESXi host. All the other ESXi hosts were updated without an issue and only single ESXi was throwing the error and it was stuck in the middle of the patch cycle. So, he sought some assistance to fix the issue.
Fixing this type of issue can be a time consuming work so I believe these steps will help my readers to fix similar issues and save some valuable time while in the middle of an update. While I was patching the host scanning was successfully completed and remediate step was completed only up to 92% and failed with the error message and redirect to check the esxupdate.log file. Actual displayed error message was this.
The host returns esxupdate error code:15. The package manager transaction is not successful. Check the Update Manager log files and esxupdate log files for more details.
While I was further checking the events I was able to find below errors as well:
“The ramdisk ‘root’ is full. As a result, the file /locker/packages/6.5.0/vmtools/windows.iso.sha could not be written“
This was also noticed:
“Could not stage image profile'(Updated) DellEMC-ESXi-6.5U1-7388607-A07″. (‘VMware_locker_tools-light_6.5.0-1.47.8285314’, ‘[Errno 32] Broken pipe’)“
As per the first error message I checked the esxupdate.log and it was similar to this.
How To Fix This Issue
After spending sometime with this I noticed that the files under “/locker/packages” directory have been corrupted, the content inside the directory was like this
I checked the same folder inside one of the upgraded host and there was a directory with the name of “6.5.0“
I deleted the “locker” folder in the update failure host and recreated with the same name
I copied the content of the “locker” directory from one of the updated host to the created “locker” directory using scp
I used below command to copy the content
scp -r /locker/packages/* root@<FQDN_OF_THE_TARGET_HOST>:/locker
Note: Host firewall should be opened before the scp
esxcli network firewall ruleset set --enabled true --ruleset-id=sshClient
Once those files were copied upgrade was successful with the Update Manager
Article Short Link: https://tcrum.net/esxupdate-error-code-15
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