Fixing my Update Manager issue

I recently upgraded vCenter to 2.5 Update 3, and this was my first time using Update Manager to update the hosts at one of my sites to ESX 3.5 Update 3 since the vCenter upgrade.  I migrated all the VMs off my “test” system, and ran an Update Manager scan to see which updates needed to be applied.  And this is when I saw this error message:

VMware Update Manager had a failure.

So I preceded to try again.  Same error.  Restart the service on the vCenter server.  Same error.  I stopped the service to look at the logs, and I see a SQL error regarding a foreign key constraint.  Searching for the error on Google, VMware, etc., I came across KB1007512.  This is the exact issue I had seen.  So following the KB, I had to let all the ESX/ESXi updates re-download.

Fast forward a couple of hours to the completion of the re-download of 5.70GB of updates.  I restart the Update Manager service and rescan my host.  I receive the same error:

VMware Update Manager had a failure.

Stop the Update Manager service once again.  Upon inspection of the log files, I see a different SQL error, this time about duplicate primary keys.  Search Google, VMware, etc.  Nothing.

I really wanted to push this off till the morning, but with the hectic schedule I had the next day, I decided to use my trusty VMware Support.  Gave them a call, and after uploading various log files to the support team, they had a fix for my issue.  In the Update Manager database, there are two tables: VCI_SCANHISTORY and VCI_SCANRESULTS.  The identity value for VCI_SCANHISTORY must be larger than the identity value for VCI_SCANRESULTS.  Running SELECT MAX(ID) FROM for VCI_SCANHISTORY and VCI_SCANRESULTS showed the identity values to be 20 and 134, respectively.  The fix was to issue the following command:

DBCC CHECKIDENT (“VCI_SCANHISTORY”, RESEED, 135)

This command reset the identity value of VCI_SCANHISTORY to 135.  With the identity value reset, I restarted the Update Manager server and successfully scanned my host to begin updating.  Thanks to VMware Support, I was able to go to bed at a reasonable hour.

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