Error: cannot install the vcenter agent service. cannot upload agent after vCSA upgrade

I was just updating a vCenter server and some ESXi hosts, but after running the vCenter update I found vCenter full of HA Agent install fails. To stop this fail loop, I turned off VMware HA while figuring out what was wrong.

Error: cannot install the vcenter agent service. cannot upload agent after vCSA upgrade

I found this kb article https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1031905, but it is very old, and I did not have any connectivity issues between vCenter and my hosts. The article however mentions right at the bottom of the page that, it could also be caused by a full root partition on the ESXi hosts.

And Sure enough, the tmp partition is full. I was wondering what might have caused it, but I quickly discovered that there was a very large log file in the /tmp folder.

The file is called: ams-bbUsg.txt and a quick google showed, to my great surprise, that it was a HPE management agent. You can read more about it here: https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-a00073323en_us&docLocale=en_US

The quick fix is to delete the file, and upgrade the management agent.

After deleting the file I was able to enable HA again, and then I patched the hosts with the new management agent.

If this information helped you in any way please let me know in the comments below.

16 thoughts on “Error: cannot install the vcenter agent service. cannot upload agent after vCSA upgrade”

  1. Thank you for sharing, we had exactly the same issue and your article helped us to fix it.:)

  2. Thank you, it helped me. I was checking that KB before and not noticed what you mentioned here until I read your article. It solved my problem thank you.

  3. Thanks, this solved my problem. After upgrading to VCSA 7.0.0b, my 7.0 hosts suffered from a full /tmp/ folder which had been overtaken by .log files generated by NSX.

  4. Hi Brian,

    Thanks for this article.
    This saved us.

    Out of all articles on Internet, only this article was on point.!

    Thanks again.

    -Abhijeet Dalal

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