I recently ran into a small issue applying a patch to one of my lab’s vCenter Servers. Specifically, attempts to patch the vCenter Server ran into the error, Exception occurred in install precheck phase.

The issue is caused post the appliance has recovered from failed update and the update state is “INSTALL_IN_PROGRESS” under “/etc/applmgmt/appliance/software_update_state.conf”

In order to resolve the issue perform the following:

  1. Login to the appliance using ssh
  2. Take a backup copy for the file “/etc/applmgmt/appliance/software_update_state.conf” to a different location
  3. Stop the applmgmt service by running command: service-control –stop applmgmt
  4. Remove the “software_update_state.conf”
  5. To remove the file use the following command without the quotes  –
    “rm -rf /etc/applmgmt/appliance/software_update_state.conf”
  6. Start the applmgmt service using command: service-control –start applmgmt
  7. Login to the VAMI to validate the access

Finally, the update was successful.

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