Hello,
I just wanted to point out a piece of information regarding VCSA upgrade to version 6 which should be more visible and documented.
The ESXi host which you are using to host your VCSA 5.x has to be LICENSED
Case:
I was just in a call with a colleague and one of our customers whom were running a full, licensed cluster for all operations, but they had a standalone FREE LICENSED host which was hosting vCenter/vCSA and a couple of terminal servers.
Customer wanted to upgrade VCSA 5.5 to VCSA 6
The upgrade kept failing.... the error we could see thru the console to the NEW vCSA6 was "Upgrade Export Failed" - In the Upgrade Wizard we could only see that "Not able to export support bundle"
These above messages were not giving a clear picture of the issue!
It was not until we checked /var/log/vmware/upgrade/ and export_upgrade.log in which we could see the percentage and stage of where the upgrade failed. Here we could see that "The license being used was not sufficient" to perform the required operations.
My two remarks to VMware is that the error message of failed upgrades are very vague in the wizard! Also, I think its strange that the upgrade process does not have any checks in place to verify if the host is licensed to perform an upgrade or not.
I can understand that normal scenarios involving vCenter usually are licensed. But there are exceptions and the troubleshooting is unnecessary and not easy for the common administrators of vSphere. That is the reason I am sharing this here, and also hopefully this will reach dev team so that in future releases of VCSA, these check are in included.
Best regards,
Glenn Gahnstedt
Hewlett-Packard, GCC VMware
