Unable to Upgrade VBR - Missing MSI installers

[sykerzner]

Hi Everyone,

We're trying to move to VBR13. To do so, we need to first upgrade VCC to 13, and to do that, we need to upgrade all our tenants VBR to at least 12.3.2.3617.

We have a handful of VBRs in the field, which we can't upgrade. Download MSI, mount, run setup.exe or the individual msis, and we get errors indicating that MSI files are missing.

After work with support, we found that the Windows Installer cache at C:\Windows\Installer was missing MSI files relating to the currently installed version. So, the upgrade tries to do.. something.. with the old version and fails.

Veeam support has given up at this point, and recommend paving the OS.

In the past we've had smaller scale issues of this type with the Agent for Linux Redistributable. Carefully finding the appropriate MSI on a similar machine, and copying it into C:\Windows\Installer (carefully renaming the msi to match the expected name in the registry) works.

I don't have a good idea of what may have removed these files. I am wondering if anyone else experienced this?

[david.domask]

Hi sykerzner,

Sorry to hear about the situation and that Support wasn't able to assist.

Do you mind sharing the case number for review? In many cases, providing the missing MSI file from an older installer / patch ought help, but maybe there was something special in this situation.

As for how this might happen, most common reason I'm aware of from my Support days was "clean-up" apps that get run on the backup servers; I won't name names but the apps typically advertise cleaning out unused or unnecessary files on Windows, and often they touch the Uninstaller Cache and delete MSIs from under there. This Microsoft article explains the behavior and reason for the error a bit more; it's oriented towards MSSQL, but it applies to any MSI really, and like the article states, usually this is due to manual intervention outside of the normal installation / update process.