Recently I was having an issue with VMware Cloud Foundation downloading patches from Vmware.

After much network troubleshooting, and determining that there was not an issue with DNS in the lab, I decided to try out the manual process from VMware.

I really didn’t want to go through the process as it looks a bit more complicated than it needed to be, but at this point I really didn’t have a choice. I also thought I could get out of downloading the bundles on a separate server. But more on that in a bit.

The first thing we need to do is generate marker files using the command ./lcm-bundle-transfer-util –generateMarker from the /opt/vmware/vcf/lcm/lcm-tools/bin directory. I tried something slightly different as I wanted the marker files to be placed in a specific directory.

Thinking I could have it drop the marker files in a temp directory I created, that is where I ran the command. However, as you can see it didn’t matter and the files were placed under /home.

Oh well, it placed them where in home I will just move them and then download the bundles to the temp folder I created.


Great, now I am ready to download the files using the command:

./lcm-bundle-transfer-util -download -outputDirectory ${absolute-path-output-dir} -sku ${sku} -depotUser ${depotUser} -markerFile ${absolute-path-markerFile} -markerMd5File ${absolute-path-markerFile.md5}

Where

absolute-path-output-dirPath to the directory where the bundle files are to be downloaded. This directory folder must have 777 permissions.If you do not specify the download directory, bundles are downloaded to the default directory with 777 permissions.
skuOptional.SKU or Service Provider of the index file.
depotUserUser name for myVMware depot. You are prompted to enter the depot user password. If there are any special characters in the password, specify the password within single quotes.
markerFileAbsolute path to the marker file, as generated in the above step.If you do not specify the path to the marker file, all update bundles on the depot are downloaded.
markerMd5FileAbsolute path to the marker MD5 checksum file, as generated in the above step.

So I kicked off the download, it had me enter my VMware account password, and it looked like everything got off to a good start.

Until

That’s weird as I know the location I was directing the bundles has a ton of space available. Well it turns out regardless of where I direct the bundles, the utility first downloads them to tmpfs and there isn’t anything you can do about it.

This appears that it is a known issue

Alright time to move the marker files to a different server to download the bundles. Well, I had a similar issue there as well. Here is what I figured out.

When you are trying to download the bundles on a different server, the utility still downloads the bundles first to a temp directory, before copying the files to the directory you specify. If you are running the utility from the C drive, but are directing the bundles to a different drive, like E, it will first download the bundles to C. Then it will move them to E. If you have plenty of space on C this isn’t an issue. I did not have space. What I ended up doing was moving the utility to the same drive I was directing the files to and then everything went as I expected. Mostly…

The second issue I had when trying to download the bundles on a second server were the marker files. I started getting this error

After much troubleshooting, it turns out the utility likes to have the marker files in the same location as the utility. So my command to download eventually looked like this:

lcm-bundle-transfer-util.bat -download -depotUser user@domain.com -outputDirectory r:/temp -markerFile markerFile -markerMd5File markerFile.md5

Then I was finally successfully able to download the bundle.

But wait there is more! Once downloaded, the download directory looks just as the KB describes

As you can see from the screenshot, the next step is to copy the “update bundle directory” back to the sddc-manager. This is slightly misleading, or at least it slightly misled me. I read this as copy the “bundles” directory back to the sddc manager. This is not what the instructions mean. If you do this and try to upload the bundles via the ./lcm-bundle-transfer-util -upload -bundleDirectory ${absolute-path-output-dir} command, you get an error.

This again took a little while to figure out because I knew the directory was in fact where I placed the bundles. What the utility is looking for is the entire folder structure in the screenshot above. In other words, I needed to copy the entire “downloadDir” back to the sddc manager. Then I was able to upload the bundles successfully.

After patching sddc-manager with the manually download bundles, it was then able to connect to VMware again to download bundles……

Thank God!

Anyway, I know this isn’t the exact directions for the manual download process, and in case you missed the link above. Here it is.

I just wanted to share some of the headaches I had through this process in hopes someone else might have a slightly easier time at it than I did.

Best of luck!

Categories: VCFVMware

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