vDS requirements in vSphere6

[ratness]

Set up a test host on ESXi 5.5-latest, vcsa appliance.  Upgrade VC and ESXi from 5.5 to 6.

The vDS is 5.5.0, and shows an 'upgrade available'.  Tell the vDS to upgrade, it marks the now-6 ESXi hosts as incompatible, and we can't proceed with 5.5->6 on the vDS.

I know that's not a showstopper, but it's WEIRD.  What requirements have changed with vDS that would prevent this?  We're trying to figure out if it's a testing anomaly or a real problem.

Thanks!

[rcporto]

Not sure if I understand your environment correctly, but all hosts connected to vDS are running vSphere ESXi 6.0 ?

Here is the documentation with requirements to upgrade your vDS to version 6.0.0: Upgrade a vSphere Distributed Switch to a Later Version

[ratness]

Yes, all ESXi hosts (all 1 of them, it's a single test host) are at 6 before following those instructions. So we're one host esxi6, one vcsa 6, and a vDS of 5.5.

At step 4, the host (running 6, I swear) is listed as incompatible, but no details are given as to why.  To proceed we'd have to remove the incompatible host, which means no upgrade, so we can't even try this to see if there's something dumped into a logfile.

[vwic]

Glad to see someone's having the same problem!

Almost the same environment here, but with 2 hosts - and all my 2 hosts are 6.0.0.

Is this a known problem? Plowed through the release notes but couldn't seem to find this issue.

[ratness]

A coworker got around it by setting up multiple hosts, shooting each host in the face one at a time, reinstalling 6 from scratch / rejoining the cluster, rather than updating in place.  THEN the VDS going to 6 worked.

Feels like this release was a little half-baked.

[vwic]

That's painful indeed. I guess I'll be waiting for a patch.

Any compelling feature in VDS 6.0 over 5.5? The new features in NIOC v3 don't seem to be a must-have - not in my environment anyway.

[ratness]

Not sure yet, we're still in feature-parity testing: looking for the ability to run the upgrades and land on 6 without some weirdo legacy something-or-other, and vDS saying 'something is wrong' was a big derail as we scoured the environment for what it could be.

Honestly, you're right, the new features aren't overly compelling right now.  Main thing was we don't want to find out "you can't upgrade vDS" was masking some serious issue and/or we need the features later.

[vwic]

Happy to report that the latest critical patch seems to have resolved the problem.

All the patched ESXi's (6.0.0 build 2615704) are now showing as "compatible" and I've upgraded them to VDS 6.0.0 successfully.

[Miky28]

I have the same problem, except I upgraded from ESXi 5.1. Now on ESXi 6.0 U1 and problem persists.