I Had to change HDDs to SATA to upgrade Server 2012R2 to 2019

[JLutter]

I'm using ESXi 6.7 free and am running several Server 2012R2 VMs (VM version 14).  I wanted to "in place" upgrade to 2019 but it kept hanging (Hard lockup) after the initial reboot.

Every time it failed, it would hang on the reboot (windows logo screen with spinning dots). I could not power off the VM.  I would even try to esxcli vm process -kill the world id and it would disappear from the process list but it would still never go down.  I had to end up rebooting the ESXi host (shutting down all my VMs) every time it failed, a more than 15 minute experience each time.

Each time after I booted up the VM again, it show a setup failed message with a generic error code that searching the internet for turned up "it could be anything" type of posts.

After days of trying different things, as in uninstalling drivers, VM Tools, stopping start-up services from running, trying different versions of the 2019 install media, etc, as a last resort I went down the list of controllers on my hard drives.  First going from LSI SAS to paravirtual, and then to SATA.  Once I changed the hard drives to SATA and uninstalled the other SCSI controllers the upgrade process finished fine.

Just an FYI if anyone else runs into this.

Should I change my hard drives back to paravirtual SCSI controllers or just leave them on SATA?

Edit: I forgot to mention that I am running DellEMC-ESXi-6.7.0-8169922 specific image of ESXi.

[a_p_]

I can't reproduce this at the moment, but from other posts it may be related to an issues with Windows 2019 having issues with the page file located on a virtual SCSI disk.

If you have another Windows 2012 VM that you want/need to update. it may be worth a try to add a second virtual SATA disk, and reconfigure Windows to use this one for the page file. Then run the upgrade.

André

[JLutter]

I do have several others.  I will try that on the next one.

Edit:  Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that these were once 2008R2 physical servers.  I used vcenter converter standalone to P2V, then upgrade to 2012R2, now I'm trying to 2019 them. 

[JLutter]

I created a new hard drive on the VM and added it to SATA and moved the pagefile over to it.  It locked up in exactly the same place.

Honestly, this "feels" like the exact same problem a had last year trying to upgrade several PC's to Windows 10 that had NVMe PCIEx4 SSD's in them.  The Windows RE boot environment that gets booted when upgrading did not have the drivers for that kind of controller/drive and would lock up in the same way, even in the same spot.  In that case I had to manually upgrade the computers and select the OCZ drivers for that device.  Then it was able to upgrade the OS on the drive.    I believe this is the very same problem.  The Windows RE (I think) boot environment does not have the proper drivers.