As you may be aware, VMware has released patches for the latest security vulnerabilities. There’s patches for both ESXi and vCenter. A client reached out to me asking if I could apply these patches for them. The client has a rather small infrastructure with two sites, two Windows vCenters and few hosts per site. The host updates installed rather easily (I used VUM for this). vCenter however, was a different story.

While I wish they were using the vCSA, they aren’t there yet. I mounted the ISO and began the installation. It was going well for about 15 minutes and then I received the following error :

The log file generated was quite large and wasn’t exactly very helpful. It turns out, VMware has a KB article to address this issue : https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2149266

I followed the article and under the resolution section, I noticed it said to open Process Explorer and review for DLLs that may be locked prior to the installation. I wasn’t able to find any of the DLLs locked but my installation was still failing. I ended up performing the following steps (some from the KB article) :

*Verify you have a known good backup of vCenter*

*Perform a snapshot of the vCenter server (regular snapshot, don’t check any boxes)*

1. Stop all VMware services in services.msc
2. Go to C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\
3. Backup the jre folder.
4. Performing step 7 in the KB article – delete all contents in the jre folder except for those two files:
   1. C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\jre\bin\libvecsjni.dll
      C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server\jre\lib\ext\vmware-endpoint-certificate-store.jar
5. Retry your vCenter installation.

I hope someone finds this helpful.