Having recently installed VMware vSphere Replication 6.5.1.2243 (Build 7184803) for a customer, I was surprised to see the Recent Tasks window pane filling up with “install” tasks with com.vmware.vcHms listed as the initiator. These tasks were occurring every minute for all hosts in the cluster.

The vSphere 6.5 web interface didn’t provide much information when looking at host tasks, other than the install task being successful. While being successful is normally great, these tasks should not be happening every minute. It was time to look through the raw logs, so I SSH’d into a host to read the /var/log/esxupdate.log file.

Esxupdate.log was filled with ERROR entries showing that vr2c-firewall.vib was failing to be installed. Vr2c-firewall.vib is used for the “Replicate to a cloud provider” option within vSphere Replication. The install failure was due to the file download from the vSphere Replication appliance failing with entries including these;

Manually downloading vr2c-firewall.vib from the URL was successful from my PC, but all attempts failed when trying to download from the hosts. There were no proxies or firewalls between the hosts and the vSphere Replication appliance, so there shouldn’t have been anything blocking it. I used WinSCP to manually copy the downloaded vr2c-firewall.vib from my PC to a datastore and performed a manual installation of the vib;

Despite the manual installation being successful on all hosts, the Recent Tasks window and esxupdate.log kept filling up. It was time to look at stopping these installation attempts being pushed from the vSphere Replication appliance itself. If you haven’t already done so, enable SSH on the vSphere Replication appliance following the steps listed at Connecting to VMware vSphere Replication 6.0.x Appliance (2112307) and then disable the push installation with the following commands;

Once the hms service was restarted, I monitored the logs and GUI for any further errors but they did not return.