VCSA 7 U1 available updates error

Today I deployed a new VCSA 7 U1 and as U2 has GA’d recently I wanted to update the environment first. So I headed to the VAMI interface > Available Updates page. Immediately there was an error:

Error in method invocation ({‘id’: ‘com.vmware.appliance.update.manifest_verification_failed’, ‘default_message’: ‘Manifest verification failed’, ‘args’: []}, ‘Verification Failure\n’, ”)

I found some blogs that showed to delete upgrade status file ‘software_update_state.conf’ at /etc/applmgmt/appliance. While I tested with renaming this file to .old this did not resolve the error.

The file was recreated but held the same info, which is in JSON format and has an the following content:

“UP_TO_DATE”, it clearly is not. So I found this KB article. This is also where I got the solution for my install. I compared the url I found in the KB article with the one that is included by default in the update settings page.

The one on the KB page is the following:

https://vapp-updates.vmware.com/vai-catalog/valm/vmw/8d167796-34d5-4899-be0a-6daade4005a3/6.7.0.31000.latest/

The one that is included in the VAMI interface is the following:

https://vapp-updates.vmware.com/vai-catalog/valm/vmw/8d167796-34d5-4899-be0a-6daade4005a3/7.0.1.00200.latest/

In my case when I alleviated the .latest from that url, updates are detected and I can proceed.

So as you can see in the screenshot below (well not entirely but you will need to take my word for it), I selected ‘Specified’ and supplied the following url:

https://vapp-updates.vmware.com/vai-catalog/valm/vmw/8d167796-34d5-4899-be0a-6daade4005a3/7.0.1.00200

As soon I clicked ‘SAVE’, the updates became available to install.