If you don’t find the Lifecycle Manager item the the vSphere menu try to run this command first:
service-control --status --all
and check if there are any stopped services like this.
As you can see we have more stopped services and even vmware-updatemgr.
Secondly try to start all the stopped running service-control --start <service> and if you get this error: “An error occurred while starting service”
go ahead resetting the VMware Update Manager Database running:
on vCenter Server Appliance 6.5: /usr/lib/vmware-updatemgr/bin/updatemgr-util reset-db
on vCenter Server Appliance 6.7/7.0: /usr/lib/vmware-updatemgr/bin/updatemgr-utility.py reset-db
and run the following Command to delete the contents of the VMware Update Manager Patch Store:
rm -rf /storage/updatemgr/patch-store/*
You have to restart the services after done. I suggest you to start all services running: service-control --start --all. You should have an output like thisone.
Now reload the GUI and you’ll see that now the Lifecycle Manager item is available.
