While enabling the vSphere Supervisor on my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0 setup, I came across an error I had not seen before as I have performed this numerous times across both vSphere 8.x and vSphere 9.0:
A general system error occurred: Solution specification in the image are incompatible with hosts 'esx02.vcf.lab, esx01.vcf.lab'
I was going through various vCenter Server logs files, but was not able to find anything useful and the strangest part was the vSphere Supervisor Service was already up and running but something about incompatibility and image.
As a last resort, I navigated over to the "Updates" tab for my vSphere Cluster and sure enough, the reason for the error was quite clear from vSphere Life Cycle Manager (vLCM) as you can see from the screenshot below.
It looks like when you configure the vLCM Remediation Settings for the cluster to "Enforce Live Patching", it will only allow updates that support ESX Live Patching and the vSphere Supervisor Service update does not and hence the error. I was hoping that this configuration purely meant that it will attempt to use ESX Live Patching when applicable but if not, it will default to non-live patching, but guess I made the wrong assumption.
The workaround was quite easy, simply update the remediation setting and uncheck the box for live patching and the vSphere Supervisor Service enablement completed without any issues.
Needless to say, I think we can certainly improve on the overall user experience for this specific error and help bubble up the message to quickly help users understand what the issue is and this is something I have already shared with the vLCM PM.
Thanks for the comment!