Thursday, 19 September 2013

Validation of Dell OMSA Online Repository in VMware Update Manager Download Sources fails

Dell kindly provide an repository containing all the VMware OpenManage versions that you can point Vmware Update Manager to in order to get the right .VIB for your ESXi server

The Update Manager service needs to be able to access the repository url which is https://vmwaredepot.dell.com/index.xml.

If Vmware Update manager lives behind a firewall then the changes are you'll be pointing it a web proxy (In my case this was ISA 2006).  Even though it was allowed unauthenticated access, the validation step kept failing.

A bit of investigation of the firewall logs revealed an odd error:
995 The I/O operation has been aborted because of either a thread exit or an application request

A bit more digging revealed this article, pointing to Java as the culprit.  As Update Manager seems to have some Java components, I updated Java to the latest version (JRE7 Update 40), both x32 and x64 but this didn't resolve the issue.

Another read of the original answer from Jim Harrison led me to wonder if a non-SSL connection would work, so I modified the URL to http://vmwaredepot.dell.com/index.xml and hey presto! the validation succeeded.

The full Dell White Paper is located here:

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