HP ESX Management agents won’t uninstall.
Earlier this week I was attempting to upgrade the HP agents on my ESX servers and on one host, for no particularly good reason I was getting a really weird error:
This script will now attempt to uninstall the HP Insight Manager Agents.
Do you wish to continue? (y/n) y
Uninstalling HP Insight Manager Agents bulletin (hp-classic-mgmt-solution-825.10.1344)
Removing (hp-classic-mgmt-solution-825.10.1344)
This script will now attempt to uninstall the HP Insight Manager Agents.
Do you wish to continue? (y/n) y
[hp-classic-mgmt-solution-v825] bulletin found.
Uninstalling ... [hp-classic-mgmt-solution-v825] bulletin
Removing {hp-classic-mgmt-solution-v825} ...
Encountered error NoMatchError:
The error data is:
Id - hp-classic-mgmt-solution-v825
Message - 1 of 6 Vibs in this bulletin have been superseded. Please try
removing the newest bulletin for this component instead.
Errno - 13
Description - No matching bulletin or VIB was found in the metadata.
Unable to remove {hp-classic-mgmt-solution-v825}. esxupdate status {13}
[ FAILED ]
Exit 0
No matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to go away. I tried removing the RPMs and that wouldn't work. I also tried to remove the bulletin's manually, but I couldn't - it yielded the exact same error as above (turns out the HP utility does anyway is make a call to esxupdate).
A bulletin is essentially a rollup of packages (RPM's in this case) which VMWare calls a VIB or vSphere Installation Bundle. In this particular instance, a single VIB was stopping the process and needed to be removed manually. How though?
I was totally stumped, so I placed a call to VMWare support, and they showed me this nifty UNDOCUMENTED command to list the VIBs:
[root@vistsfo1 831]# esxupdate --vib-view query | grep hp
rpm_hp-smh-templates_8.2.5-51@noarch installed 2009-07-13T10:07:01.211124-07:00
rpm_hp-snmp-agents_8.2.5-50.vmware4x@x86_64 installed 2009-07-13T10:07:01.141505-07:00
cross_hpilo_400.1.1.1.1VMW-00001 retired 2009-07-13T10:07:01.275159-07:00
rpm_vmware-esx-drivers-scsi-hpsa_400.3.6.14.27vmw-1.0.7.193498@x86_64 retired 2009-09-26T22:04:40.219785-07:00
rpm_vmware-esx-drivers-scsi-hpsa_400.3.6.14.28vmw-2vmw.1.9.208167@x86_64 installed 2009-11-27T10:40:13.064463-08:00
rpm_hpsmh_3.0.1-73@x86_64 installed 2009-07-13T10:07:01.490639-07:00
rpm_hp-health_8.2.5-50.vmware4x@x86_64 installed 2009-07-13T10:07:01.224935-07:00
rpm_hp-agents-config_8.2.5-24@noarch installed 2009-07-13T10:07:01.148444-07:00
Great! Now, to remove the offending package. In my case I knew it was the right VIB because it was there were only 2 non driver related VIBs installed.
[root@vistsfo1 831]# esxupdate remove -b rpm_hp-snmp-agents_8.2.5-50.vmware4x@x86_64
So now onto the interesting part. The --vib-view command is a hidden command for esxupdate. It's not in the man page, so how could anyone know about this handy flag without calling VMWare? Well, hindsight brings up and interesting method... open esxupdate on your ESX server. On line 146 (ESX 4U1) you can see this:
# Hidden options
parser.add_option('--HA', action='store_true', help=optparse.SUPPRESS_HELP)
parser.add_option('--vib-view', action='store_true', dest='vibview',
help=optparse.SUPPRESS_HELP)
parser.add_option('--maintenancemode', action='store_true',
help=optparse.SUPPRESS_HELP)
I suppose I could have just looked that the script to find that out!
Hopefully this will help, I saw a few posts out there about it.
vSphere Update 1 and HP SIM agents
Phew - I'm glad I waited a little bit before installing vSphere update 1!
Turns out there's a nasty bug that will PSOD (purple screen of death) your vSphere hosts when updating if you are running HP SIM agents.
You can find the information here.
The document says that you should stop the HP agents on your host before updating. I can verify that this worked for me. I can also verify that not doing this will cause a PSOD - a colleague of mine had it happen.
This is exactly why I always wait at least a week after any major update... to see if it made the news.