I was recently involved in a process of migrating from vSphere 4 to vSphere 5 for an enterprise client leapfrogging from vSphere 4.0 to vSphere 5.0. Their platform is and AMD service farm with modern, socket G34 CPU blades and 10G Ethernet connectivity – all moving parts on VMware’s Hardware Compatibility List for all versions of vSphere involved in the process.
There's nothing I can find in VMware Communities that relates to this issue. Going through C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs\vpxd-x.log there's an error stating “Alert:false@ D:/build/ob/bora-455964/bora/vim/lib/vdb/vdb.cpp:3253″
Searching VMware KB for this string turns up only one KB article. It is important – if not helpful – to note that searching KB for “import fail internal error” does return nine different (and unrelated) articles, but it does NOT return this KB (we’ve made a request to VMware to make this KB easier to find in a simpler search). VMware’s KB2008366 illuminates the real reason why the host import fails: non-Y2K compliant BIOS date is rejected as NULL data by vCenter5.
VMware KB2008366 says, “if the BIOS release date of the host is in the MM/DD/YY format, contact the hardware vendor to obtain the current MM/DD/YYYY format.” Indeed, upgrading to a four-digit year in the BIOS release date fixes the problem.
Full blog of issue: http://bit.ly/vC5Y2Kfail
Is there a work-around for this issue to avoid BIOS updates (especially where this is the sole restriction preventing import into vCenter5)?