Starting from this year for Virtual Machine Manager, as well as for other System Center products, an updated version will be released each 6 months (semi-annual channel). In February it was announced that version 1801 of System Center Virtual Machine Manager and the update is recommended to take advantage of the new features and to have greater integration with Microsoft Azure. This article describes a specific issue that you can encounter while upgrading, reporting in detail the causes and how you can resolve it.
In order to upgrade to version 1801 of System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM 1801) you can not do an upgrade in place, but you must completely uninstall SCVMM maintaining the database, and perform a new installation by using the existing database. The detailed procedure is described in this Microsoft's document and it requires a careful preliminary verification of the requirements as well as to have, for precautionary purposes, a backup of the SCVMM database. If you are using more System Center products it is important to proceed with the update according to the sequence in the document.
Figure 1 - Installation Wizard Step with the use of the existing VMM DB
During the setup the installation of Virtual Machine Manager 1801 may fail with the following error: “Unable to connect to the VMM database because of a general database failure. Ensure that the SQL Server is running and configured correctly, then try the operation again“.
Figure 2 – Error during the upgrade to version 1801
As can be seen it is a generic error and to obtain further details it is necessary to consult the log of the Wizard (“C:ProgramDataVMMLogsSetupWizard.log“) which include the following details:
Figure 3 - Error reported in the installation logs
The error refers to a known issue documented in the release notes of VMM 1801:
Figure 4 – Documented known issue
The problem occurs if in the current Virtual Machine Manager installation has been changed the name of one of the port classifications present by default. In the specific case, controlling the table “[dbo].[tbl_NetMan_PortClassification]” in the Virtual Machine Manager database, there is an entry, with the ID reported in the error, that has the name that is “Management” instead of “Host management” (default name).
Figure 5 – Entry with non-default name in the table "tbl_NetMan_PortClassification"
The difficulty, when this error comes, is to accurately know which are the default names of the port classifications. For this reason we report the default port classifications that it is necessary that they are not changed in the name to successfully upgrade to SCVMM 1801.
Figure 6 – Port classifications present by default
If you are in this condition it is necessary to change the names of port classifications, above reported, bringing them all to default and then repeat the installation setup of SCVMM 1801.
When this is done the installation of SCVMM 1801 will not end with the error described above.
Figure 7 – Upgrade to SCVMM 1801 successfully completed
Changing the port classification may be temporary, and after the upgrade is possible to evaluate to name them at will.
Conclusions
This specific error condition occurs in a systematic way if there is the described situation, so it's good if you can consider it before proceeding with the upgrade of SCVMM 1801, in order to avoid it. In case you encounter the error is still possible to easily solve it with the information reported in the article.
