Issues preparing to upgrade ESXi 6.5 to 6.7

[srwsol]

Hi folks:

About 8 months ago I tried to upgrade my ESXi 6.5 to 6.7, but I had William Lam's DVIMaclearn vib installed and couldn't do the upgrade.  I gave up on it at the time and went about fixing the VM that was using it (a linux copy of OpenVPN that was doing bridge mode and needed promiscuous mode).   Now I was going back to see if I could prepare to upgrade from 6.5 to 6.7 and the first step was going to be to remove the DVIMaclearn vib, but it appears that the change management database is screwed up.  When I did a dry run of trying to remove the Maclearn vib I got this error:

[root@intelserver:~] esxcli software vib remove --dry-run --vibname=esx-dvfilter-maclearn

[DependencyError]

VIB VMware_locker_tools-light_10.3.2.9925305-10176879 requires esx-version >= 6.6.0, but the requirement cannot be satisfied within the ImageProfile.

Please refer to the log file for more details.

[root@intelserver:~]

I then read somewhere that if I manually upgraded the tools package that error would go away, so I downloaded the tools package, manually extracted the 6.5 vib and did a dry-run install in it, and got the following errors:

[root@intelserver:~] esxcli software vib update --dry-run -v /tmp/VMware_locker_tools-light_6.5.0-10.2.5.8068406.vib

[DependencyError]

VIB VMware_locker_tools-light_10.3.2.9925305-10176879 requires esx-version >= 6.6.0, but the requirement cannot be satisfied within the ImageProfile.

File path of '/usr/libexec/jumpstart/plugins/dvfilter-maclearn.json' is claimed by multiple non-overlay VIBs: {'VMware_bootbank_vmware-esx-dvfilter-maclearn_1.00-1.00', 'VMware_bootbank_esx-dvfilter-maclearn_6.5.0-0.0.4282379'}

File path of '/usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/dvfilter-maclearn' is claimed by multiple non-overlay VIBs: {'VMware_bootbank_vmware-esx-dvfilter-maclearn_1.00-1.00', 'VMware_bootbank_esx-dvfilter-maclearn_6.5.0-0.0.4282379'}

Please refer to the log file for more details.

[root@intelserver:~]

So just for the heck of it I tried a dry-run on both using the -f option and it says it would have done the first one, and the second one it would have skipped I think, but I don't know if it would have fixed the dependency error or not:

[root@intelserver:~] esxcli software vib remove -f --dry-run --vibname=esx-dvfilter-maclearn

Removal Result

   Message: Dryrun only, host not changed. The following installers will be applied: [LiveImageInstaller, BootBankInstaller]

   Reboot Required: false

   VIBs Installed:

   VIBs Removed: VMware_bootbank_esx-dvfilter-maclearn_6.5.0-0.0.4282379

   VIBs Skipped:

[root@intelserver:~]

[root@intelserver:~] esxcli software vib update --dry-run -f -v /tmp/VMware_locker_tools-light_6.5.0-10.2.5.8068406.vib

Installation Result

   Message: Dryrun only, host not changed. The following installers will be applied: []

   Reboot Required: false

   VIBs Installed:

   VIBs Removed:

   VIBs Skipped: VMware_locker_tools-light_6.5.0-10.2.5.8068406

[root@intelserver:~]

So now I'm not sure how to proceed.  Should I only try forcing one of these first, and if so which one first, or should I do both, or something else?  I'm also not sure what happened on the original 6.6 attempt that resulted in this issue, as I thought I ended up backing out of the whole thing on reboot by going back to the previous version. 

Suggestions welcome.

Edit:

I did some more playing around with vib remove --dry-run and it appears that no matter what vib I try to remove I get the same dependency errors, so I must conclude that these specific vibs aren't tied to each other in some way, or to any other vib, but rather are screwed up somehow in and of themselves and short of using -f, either to remove them, or force install something else without removing them, I'm not going to be able to update anything.

I feel pretty good about force removing dvfilter-maclearn and vmware-esx-dvfilter-maclearn (I think this latter one is part of the original maclearn as it has a 2015 date on the vib where all the rest of the stuff is 2017 or later), as I don't believe they had any relationship to any other vibs.  I'm not so sure though about locker_tools_light though, especially when the dry-run on force updating it to a newer version shows that the update was skipped.

Edit 2:

After more research I find that the issue with the tools-light is an artifact from rolling back from 6.7 to 6.5.   The instructions in the release notes say to re-install the older version, but I apparently can't without force removing the current tools-light, and then because of the maclearn issue I'm would have to force install the 6.5 version afterward.  I'm thinking I'm going to have to do this first, and then tackle the maclearn dependency issue.  Does anyone know if this change management system somehow keeps track of the order you do things (i.e. does it matter which order I do things in if I have to use -f to make it happen)?