Problem with vCenter VAMI interface after upgrade to VCSA 6.0 U1.

Yesterday VMware released new version of products such as vSphere 6.0 U1, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 6.1 or VSAN 6.1. As it's time to upgrade my lab I decided to patch my vCenter Appliance 6.0. VCSA 6.0 U1 offers again the Virtual Appliance Management Interface (VAMI) that is really useful and now totally rewritten - in HTML 5 🙂

In this post I will describe what issue I faced after updating my vCenter Appliance 6.0 to VCSA 6.0 U1. An update process is easy as I described it in my post some months ago. However when I patched (it was much faster than the second time what will be mentioned later in this post) my vCenter, rebooted it and wanted to check VAMI interface, I hit a wall 😀 VAMI is available under https://VCSA_FQDN:5480 but unfortunately I could not connect. I logged in VCSA via SSH and checked if anything listened on 5480 port. Unfortunately I didn't find any service 🙁

During investigating a boot log (/var/log/boot.msg) I found the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/opt/vmware/share/vami/vami_ovf_process", line 25, in <module>
import libxml2
File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/libxml2.py", line 1, in <module>
ImportError: No module named libxml2mod

I checked if libxml2 was installed:

I have faced few times when problem with libxml2 was caused because of mismatch version (installed vs required). I checked on another VCSA 6.0 what version of libxml2 is installed there and was the same! I decided to patch again my VCSA (it needed much more time that during the first time..). When I rebooted my VCSA and checked VAMI... voilà 😉 I could log in:

I checked a version of libxml2 again and it was a little bit better 😉

As you can see, at least libxml2 package was not updated correctly. There are additional logs that you should check:

/var/log/vmware/applmgmt/software-packages.log

/var/log/vmware/applmgmt/vami.log

UPDATE 09.2015: If you have disabled IPv6 on VCSA, please disable IPv6 in lighttpd.conf as well. Probably it will solve the problem. Just edit the /etc/applmgmt/appliance/lighttpd.conf file and change server.use-ipv6="enable" to server.use-ipv6="disable".

UPDATE 12.2015: VMware published a KB about this problem.