Almost two years ago I wrote a blogpost about a failure during installing the vCenter Server agent(HA) service. This post is one of most read articles on my blog. You can find the orginal post here. Recently, I ran into this problem again. This time I could not solve the problem using my earlier post.
I have found a workaround to this problem that is easy to implement and works well. I have been able to use it successfully several times recently.
- Put the ESXi host in Maintenance Mode
- SSH to the ESXi host
- esxcli software vib remove -n vmware-fdm (no reboot needed)
- Wait a few minutes and the result should like this:
Removal Result
Message: Operation finished successfully.
Reboot Required: false
VIBs Installed:
VIBs Removed: VMware_bootbank_vmware-fdm_7.0.3-19193900
VIBs Skipped:
- Check if the vCenter Server agent is removed
- esxcli software vib list | grep fdm (result should be empty)
- Exit Maintenance Mode, HA agent will be installed
- Check if the vCenter Server agent is installed
- esxcli software vib list | grep fdm (result should be like this:
vmware-fdm 7.0.3-19193900 VMware VMwareCertified 2022-10-12 - Done
Thank you for this. It didn’t exactly fix my problem but got me close enough to discover the root cause. A budget SSD that was holding an empty datastore had finally ceased to function – but was still marked as A-ok by vCenter.
Dropping into the command line, I attempted to remove the fdm agent and got a disk access error. Dug a little deeper and just unmounted and deleted the failed disk. vCenter was able to reinstall the agent automatically.
Thanks for the excellent website!