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Does the ARC agent cause a conflict with in-place upgrades?

Joel Kraft 1 Reputation point
2024-02-19T21:50:09.16+00:00

We have generally moved to in-place server upgrades, which have worked reliably for years now (unlike the olden days)... but now I'm getting failures across the board. The only thing that is really of interest in the error is this message referring to the virtual account for the ARC service:

Can't retrieve group information for user NT SERVICE\himds NetUserGetLocalGroups failed 0x000008AD

It is not like a virtual service account is something exotic that should cause an update to fail, but this is really all I have to go on. Is ARC to blame here? The prospect of having to remove it and reinstall is not something that I particularly would look forward to, since there are multiple steps involved. 

Azure Arc
Azure Arc
A Microsoft cloud service that enables deployment of Azure services across hybrid and multicloud environments.
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  1. Marcin Policht 13,175 Reputation points MVP
    2024-02-19T23:14:07.66+00:00

    This is the account created by Azure Arc (as per https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-arc/servers/agent-overview ) - so it appears that there is a correlation. My suggestion would be to test the upgrade on one system where such upgrade previously failed - and determine whether it completes successfully once you uninstall the agent. If so, you might want to raise a support case with Microsoft

    hth Marcin

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  2. Joel Kraft 1 Reputation point
    2024-02-29T03:26:02.3366667+00:00

    Thanks for the suggestion. Took me a few days to find time to play with this again. Happily, the issue does not appear to be related to ARC even though that was the error message I ended up getting when trying to upgrade several different machines. I changed from the Win2022 January ISO to the Win2022 February ISO, and now all of my upgrades are working perfectly. Perhaps the January one was broken, or had gotten corrupted. I'm happy that I don't have to try to remove ARC before doing the upgrade. ARC recognizes the updated OS pretty much immediately!