vCenter upgrade from 5.5.0 to 5.5.0B - Big mistake?

[fq13]

We had a happy vCenter 5.5.0 server running on Windows Server 2008, until we made the mistake of upgrading to 5.5.0B. Shortly after the upgrade, the vCenter server was running smoothly. However, about 5 hours later, the server started being plagued by issues such as the inventory service consistently failing to start, inventory service logs eating up all available space (we are talking 50GB in a matter of a few hours), Veeam backups failing, vMotion failing, and a few other issues which I believe revolve around the inventory service acting up. I have been working with VMware tech support for about 5 days now and we are at a point where we are considering just rolling back to a backup prior to the upgrade to 5.5B and just stick to 5.5.

My question is, has anyone else tried an upgrade from vCenter 5.5.0 to 5.5.0B? Was the update successful?

[toemk]

What about a fresh install and re-using the database? And don't forget to re-use your SSL-Certs....

[jjgunn]

I would like to hear others experience(s) with the upgrade from 5.5 to 5.5b

I'm holding off after seeing this thread.

Any specific "gotcha's"?

It seems to me this upgrade (update) should be fairly easy, especially coming from a fresh install of 5.5.0

[fq13]

@toemk

After literally 7 days of nightmare, and AT LEAST, 12 hours of working with VMware tech support on the phone (combined), tech support recommended that we set up a brand new VM and start from scratch and just use the existing vcenter database. And that's what I just finished doing. This was a complete pain. Why should I have to reinstall everything from scratch when just installing a patch?!

@jjgunn

I don't know if ours was a one-time instance, but we followed everything down to the book when doing the update to 5.5B. If you ask me, do NOT do the update unless there is a new fix that you are looking for in the update and it's mentioned in the 5.5B release notes. We thought this update was easy, and it should have been easy, but it completely broke a very healthy vCenter server. We didn't have any issues prior to the 5.5B update.

[jjgunn]

Thanks for the response. Did you install everything in this order when initially attempting the 5.5.0b patch?

1) SSO

2) Web Client

3) Inventory Service

4) vCenter

I'm also using Win 2008 R2 with SQL 2008 R2

I definitely won't try the update. Thank you for the input

[fq13]

Yup, everything in that order. We had updated from vCenter 5 to 5.5 soon after 5.5 came out and that went without problems.

That's the exact setup we had on our (now decommissioned) vCenter, Win Server 2008 R2 and SQL 2008 R2. But on the new one we had to set up we just did Server 2012. If your environment is happy and healthy, I would personally say definitely avoid this update.

[jjgunn]

Thank you.

About the only difference I see, is ours is a fresh install of 5.5.0 (not an upgrade).

Seeing as though it's Friday afternoon & I don't want to end up working over the weekend.....this project is ON HOLD!

[fq13]

Yup, smart decision to put the project on hold!

I hate to recommend against any patch/update, but this one really just turned out to be a nightmare. I really hope that we don't go through this again in future updates/patches. Granted, we probably won't upgrade unless there really is a feature or fix we are looking for. Like in the case of going from 5.1 to 5.5. The number of new features etc was really worth it.

[sgunelius]

We encountered a similar issue where we recently deployed some new HP BL465 G8s with ESXi 5.5 on our existing vCenter server, but then decided to get current with 5.5.0b about two weeks ago and have been having issues with the hosts going offline.  We have to hard boot the hosts to get them back and are now in the process of uninstalling 5.5.0b and going back to the previous release.