Self-inflicted vCSA 6 upgrade issues

Today I was excited to upgrade my vCSA 5.5 to vCSA 6.0 and eventually the whole lab to vSphere 6.0.

I had issues upgrading the vCSA. The upgrade failed during the export phase with “Internal error occurs during export”. Looked around and found the VMware vSphere 6.0 Release Notes mention the below:

“Workaround for Internal error occurs during export: Check whether the static IP address and DNS you entered in the Setup Temporary Network wizard of the vCenter Server Appliance upgrade interface are valid and belong to the same VLAN.”

During the upgrade process I thought I was choosing the proper vSwitch for the temporary network. In fact I wasn’t. I had forgotten that during my preparation to take the VCP-550 exam, I had created a Distributed Switch and migrated all the Port Groups in the vDS. I had totally missed the warnings that only ephemeral portgroups were supported;

I confirmed this is the case by checking the portgroup settings and found that the portgroup was indeed set to “Static Binding”. I thought O.K lets change that to Ephemeral but this was not possible because the portgroup had vms attached to it.

In that case, I created a new portgroup with Ephemeral binding with the same VLAN id as the portgroup where the vCSA 5.5 is attached. Now the “DS Temp Network” port group was available for selection.

P.S Make sure the teaming options are set properly otherwise the upgrade may fail with Cannot upload UpgradeRunner via ssh tunnel. Yes it happened to me aswell!

I proceeded with the upgrade and everything went well once all the issues were resolved.

These issues were 100% caused by quickly trying to do something in between other things and I was not 100% concentrated. Others could be doing the upgrade under pressure and would be in the same situation, i.e missing a”minor” details. That is why I decided to write this article.

If it helped, let me know in the comments below 🙂