I'm leaving this here in case others come looking...
On Sunday (2/8) I decided it was time to update (via online process) the vCenter Appliance that was running in my lab (sorry...negligent of me but I don't recall the version, I don't think it's material to the saga though). I had just updated another one at work and it went flawlessly so I didn't expect any problems. What followed was 2 days of heartache.
The update appeared to start OK, if a bit slowly. As time passed and the VM had yet to come fully back up and my vCenter was therefore down I began to look more closely (fortunately this wasn't a prod. system, just lab). After a good 24 hours of reading logs, poking through config. files, etc. I finally decided I'd just hopelessly corrupted the VM. I scrapped it, downloaded a fresh .OVA at the level I was trying to upgrade to and proceeded to try to redeploy.
Well...that didn't work so great (until about 5 minutes ago). The host that the vCSA had been running on initially is a Dell R820, fully patched (firmware) as of December 1 2014 and running ESXi 5.5 (2068190), x4 Intel E5-4620s with 192GB RAM, local disk in a RAID-5 plus a PCI SSD. This was where I tried to re-deploy the appliance...and God help me did it ever fail miserably. It was slow to import, though I didn't recognize it immediately as being particularly slow. However, trying to start and configure the system was incredibly painful. It took *hours* (I'm not kidding) to get the services to appear to have started up all the way and when I did the web interface (9443) still didn't work. Just to pile the punishment on I actually tried this twice (I probably owe my wife some flowers...)
Ultimately I decided I'd go ahead and try to deploy onto another host. And lo and behold...it took 5 minutes to get a completely functional system. This is an HP DL380 G7, x2 X5650s with 64GB RAM and disks in a RAID-10.
I have absolutely no idea why changing hosts made a difference, there are 10 other VMs running happily on the Dell. But I hope putting this here will shortcut someone else's pain.
