vRealize LogInsight Upgrade Fails During /etc/hosts Pre-Upgrade Validation.

All this while I have been blogging about vRealize Operations Manager, however the more I work with LogInsight, the more I fall in love with the product and its fantastic capabilities. The good news for me is that both vROps and LogInsight work beautifully together and hence I have another area where I can explore and learn and enhance my capabilities around managing and monitoring the SDDC platform and it's tenants.

With that, let me quickly jump into what I want to share. 

While trying to upgrade the LogInsight 2.5 GA built to LogInsight 3.0 for a customer, the process failed during the pre-upgrade check with the following error on the GUI

UpgradeError: "2.5GA Log Insight deployment didn't pass pre-upgrade validation: localhost used for host ;127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts. Please edit /etc/hosts and remove the string localhost from all non-loopback addresses."

I logged into the LogInsight Master node using the root credentials and browsed to the following directory using the command

cd /var/log/loginsight

I looked up into the upgrade.log and found the same error in the upgrade.log as well. Based on the advice given in the error log, I checked the /etc/hosts files and found that someone had played around with the entries in this file. I immediately referred to the Bible Blog on LogInsight by Steven Flanders and found this article which talks about the importance of /etc/hosts file. 

While browsing through VMware KB, I found this KB which talks about how this entry should be as per the recommended practices from OS and Application perspective. This is how the entry should be on all the nodes (if you have more than one) in the /etc/hosts file.

Example 

10.11.12.13  <HOST FQSDN> <HOST CNAME>

127.0.0.1    localhost

Once configured on all the nodes, restart the loginisght service using the following command

service loginsight restart

Attempt the upgrade again and you will be successful this time. I wanted to document this and bring all of this learning together, so that you can benefit out of this and save time during upgrades :-)

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