Thursday, March 30, 2017

vCenter 6.5 upgrade: A problem occurred while - Starting VMware Postgres...

While migrating from a Windows vCenter 5.5 server to vCSA 6.5, I received the following errors while running the Migration Assistant:

A problem occurred while - Starting VMware Postgres...

and

This is an unrecoverable error, please retry install. 



This occurred during Stage 2 of the process.  The resulting vm-support.tgz file included a vcdb_import.err file which contained the following error:

NOTICE:  constraint "fk_vpx_lic_auto_keys_entity_id" of relation "vpx_lic_auto_keys" does not exist, skipping
NOTICE:  constraint "fk_vpx_lic_auto_keys_asset_id" of relation "vpx_lic_auto_keys" does not exist, skipping
NOTICE:  drop cascades to constraint fk_vpx_dbm_counter_values on table vpx_dbm_counter_value
NOTICE:  constraint "fk_vpx_dbm_counter_values" of relation "vpx_dbm_counter_value" does not exist, skipping
ERROR:  unquoted carriage return found in data
HINT:  Use quoted CSV field to represent carriage return.
CONTEXT:  COPY vpx_event_arg, line 374050

This is a known issue referenced in the following KB: 

With the help of our DBA, we reduced the tasks and events tables down to 30 days.  

The procedure to purge old data is located here: 

This resolved the issue and we were able to continue with the upgrade.

An alternative is to NOT migrate the Events and Task Data.  Unfortunately,  this will also exclude the performance metrics from being migrated:

4 comments:

  1. Luckily passed this stage :-)

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    1. You most certainly are lucky! I've had quite a few "hiccups" with this upgrade/migration.

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  2. It's a shame that VMware's answer is "delete your data" or "don't import your data". I ran into this problem and found out it was one record out of 31 million rows.

    The answer is in the exported data leftover from the Migration Assistant. On the Windows vCenter, look in c:\users\\AppData\Local\VMware\Migration-Assistant\export\vcdb folder. You should see VPX_EVENT_ARG_x.csv files (they may be huge). Use a text editor that can open files that large and go to the line number from the log (374050 in this example) in each file until you find the offending line. You'll know you've found it when you see a line directly below it beginning with a comma. The first numeric value in the problem row is the ID in the VPX_EVENT_ARG table. Use a SQL update statement to fix the line in your source database and run the migration again. If your text editor supports a regex search use ^, to find all the problem rows in the .csv files and then fix them using SQL.

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