Posted in ESXi

Cannot copy files to host data.host. Check the management service status, network connectivity with vCenter and disk space on the host.

   16 August 2021

Oh boy, oh boy, what a bumpy ride I had with upgrading my vSphere environment form 6.5 version to 7.0.2. First I had issue with prolong boot on ESXi hosts, I wrote about this in this article providing solution, now after following workaround I upgraded to 7GA (generic version, first release) and wanted to run patch to 7u2a-build-17867351.

I was unable to do so as patch was showed as Compliant:

And once I tried to run it, system said there is nothing to upgrade. However the version of ESXi host was shown as 7.0.0 with build version 16324942.

I was puzzled but I decide to run upgrade from ISO to 7.0.2, not as a patch but separate upgrade. That approach was not successful as I received error message:

Cannot copy files to host data host. Check the management service status, network connectivity with vCenter and disk space on the host

From that error message I had to check two thing:

  1. Connectivity issue, which in my mind was not a cause as I successfully upgraded from 6.5 to 7.0 and I was able to patch that hosts in the past.
  2. Disk space issue, which seems to be weird, however maybe some files took more space than expected.

I started from login to the host and check, just for the sake of checking, if I can communicate with VCSA on port 9084

nc -z [VCSA_IP] 9084

Connection was successful.

That was expected. Now I decide to check what was more likely causing the trouble -> disk space.

I run the command vdf -h and the results was not something I expected.

No disk space issue!

Well in this case the only logical step for me was to reset VMware Update Manager Database on vCenter server appliance. 


NOTE: Performing that action will remove all baselines you may have created!

NOTE: If you running vSAN this action will remove defaults baselines also. These baselines are recreated automatically when there is a configuration change to vSAN such as add/remove a host/disk or an update to the HCL DB. You can still safely update a vSAN cluster without the vSAN default baselines.

Here are steps to perform reset DB:

  1. SSH to your vCenter appliance
  2. If you are in appliance shell run command shell to switch to bash
  3. Stop Update Manager service:
service-control --stop vmware-updatemgr
  1. Depends on your vCenter version run the command:

If you running appliance 6.5 : /usr/lib/vmware-updatemgr/bin/updatemgr-util reset-db

If you running appliance 6.7 or higher: /usr/lib/vmware-updatemgr/bin/updatemgr-utility.py reset-db

  1. Delete the content of patch store:
rm -rf /storage/updatemgr/patch-store/*
  1. Finally start  the Update Manager Service:
service-control --start vmware-updatemgr

After the procedure, I re-created baseline and finally I saw it was Non-compliant.

After running update finally I saw what I was aiming for :

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