What to do if you cannot see the new patch in Lifecycle Manager? Here is a fix!

One of my team members informed me that there is no new patch in Lifecycle Manager and the latest patch visible is update 2a – 17867351. I had to see this for myself. I logged in to vCenter and I confirmed that the latest patch I could see was :

Looks like there is some issue with sync. I went to the menu and the Lifecycle manager. From the Action menu, I chose to sync updates. And of course, it failed:

To fix the issue we need to reset VMware Update Manager Database on a vCenter Server Appliance:

NOTE: The following is a destructive task. Ensure you have working backups and/or snapshots of the vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 / vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 and make a note of all custom configurations like proxy settings, third party download URLs, customized baselines, etc. before proceeding.

SSH to your appliance
Stop the VMware Update Manager Service

service-control --stop vmware-updatemgr

Run the following command to reset the VMware Update Manager Database:
- vCenter Server Appliance 6.5: /usr/lib/vmware-updatemgr/bin/updatemgr-util reset-db
- vCenter Server Appliance 6.7/7.0: /usr/lib/vmware-updatemgr/bin/updatemgr-utility.py reset-db

Run the following command to delete the contents of the VMware Update Manager Patch Store:

rm -rf /storage/updatemgr/patch-store/*

Start the VMware Update Manager Service:

service-control --start vmware-updatemgr

NOTE: You may need to log out and log back into any instances of the vSphere Web Client.

For vSAN environments, this will also remove the vSAN default baselines. 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.

For environments where NSX-T is deployed, do not reset the database if NSX-T is installed on a VCLM-enabled cluster