Introduction

Sometimes you can find some issues in older environment while upgrading that you haven’t seen before. This blogpost is about one that I’ve never seen before, but luckily is very easy to fix.We were upgrading the our environment from 6.7 U3x to 7.0 U3h. The upgrade eventually failed on the second step in the upgrade process where the services get started. It could not start vPostgreSQL. Let’s dive in!

Troubleshooting

After initially troubleshooting we didn’t find anything so we tried the upgrade again. But the second time gave us the same error after we did some more digging and found the following log entry in the log called /var/log/firstboot/vpostgres-firstboot.py_9697_stderr.log:

Further diving into this it seems that this “amcheck_next.control” is a residue formed by executing the following script “vpgsql-consistency-check.sh” to check if the database can read all the data it has. The workings of the script can be found in VMware KB #53062. If you open up the script and look closely you can see the following:

It seems to check for the presence of the extension. A bit further in the script it executes the function. This also puts a pg_extension entry in the vPostgreSQL database, which apparently isn’t there anymore in the newer vPostgreSQL versions since those versions don’t use that library anymore. To check if this extension is present in your vPostgreSQL database execute the following commands:

Here we can see the second entry which is called ‘amcheck_next’. This was the result for the consistency check mentioned earlier. Now the only thing we have to do is drop the extension by executing the following command (Make sure you have a backup just in case):

Once this is done the following should be the result if you execute the steps mentioned earlier again:

There you have it! Now your vCenter Server upgrade will run through fine. It’s strange that the pre-upgrade checker does not notice you if there are missing libraries because it does check on this. If we would’ve known this earlier it would’ve made the upgrade that much quicker! I hope this helps for everybody that is facing this issue.

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