VMware upgrade 6.5 to 6.7 issue

[AndreParsons]

Hi.

I haven't done extensive searches but could not find anything about the issue I encountered during an upgrade from VMware 6.5 to 6.7.

The vCenter and hosts were upgraded to 6.7U2. I then upgraded the vCenter to 6.7U3 and was trying to upgrade the hosts when I hit an issue where the hosts would not enter maintenance mode. I did some digging and found out that all my VMs suddenly have this "HD audio" device attached to them which was not there before the upgrade from 6.7U2 to 6.7U3. None of these VMs were P to V'd so I don't expect to see this device.

Has anyone encountered this before? I need to get to the bottom of this as I have other sites to upgrade and I don't want to have this happen again. Any thoughts will be appreciated.

I now have to shutdown approx 300 VMs and remove the device from each one so that I can continue the upgrade.

[AndreParsons]

Hi.

Just an update. I noticed that if I use the HTML5 client, I don't see this "HD audio" device under "Edit setting". I only see it when using the "flex" client. It doesn't appear on all VMs, just a few. Why would the Flex client show different hardware settings?

[sudeshnas]

Hello@AndreParsons,

By any chance are these vm's got created on VMware Workstation and then imported into an 6.x ESXi/vCenter environment.

Regards,

Sudeshna Sarkar

[a_p_]

sudeshnas​

It's not only the HD Audio, but other settings too (e.g. virtual floppy) which do not show up in the HTML5 VM settings dialog. However, some of the settings show up on the VM's General pane. I got feedback that the developers have been made aware of this, so I assume this will be fixed in an future version/patch.

In the meantime one can to either use the flash client, or the VMRC to edit such settings.

André

[jonastro]

Hello Andre,

Thanks for posting in VMware Communities.

Is there a possibility that these 300 VMs were cloned from a common template ?

And if the template was originally a VM on workstation and was imported to vCenter ?

I have checked on multiple forums and communities and this seems to be a unique issue reported so far.

Here's a quick way to isolate @ - AndreParsons​

Whenever a change is updated on the powered on virtual machines(like adding new device or configuration changes), the last modified date on the vmx file gets updated.

Can you get any VMs which is powered on for quite  some time even before the upgrade and check the last modified date of the vmx file of those VMs.

If all the powered on VM's vmx file shows the last modified time to be the same time when the upgrade was done, we can confirm the upgrade had added the "HD audio" device to the VMs or should look for other ways to isolate this issue..

Regards,

Jonathan

vSphere Install-Upgrade Support