Unable to upgrade PowerEdge 2950-III from 5.1 U1 to 5.5 U2

[Speedbird186]

Hi,

I am upgrading our vSphere environment from 5.1 to 5.5. I upgraded vCenter first using appliance upgrade method. I upgraded Update Manager (in-place) to 5.5 and successfully upgraded a "similar" PowerEdge 2950-III using the customized Dell ESXi ISO imported in Update Manager.

A second PowerEdge 2950-III does not successfully upgrade. At 46% of the "Remediate entity" task fails with the event "The upgrade is not supported on the host hardware. The upgrade ISO image contains VIBs that failed the host hardware compatibility check."

The server's technical details are as follows:

• CPU: 2x Intel Xeon X5355
• BIOS: v2.70
• PERC 5
• ISP2432 Fibre Channel (not in use, legacy)

The only real difference is the CPU as well as the PERC. The server that upgraded successfully has an Intel Xeon X5460 and a PERC 6/i.

I have also tried using the Dell 5.5 ISO without updates and it returns the same error.

According to the compatibility guide, it should be compatible: VMware Compatibility Guide: System Search

The Hardware Status currently does have a warning status (predictive disk failure). I can't seem to find any docs to indicate that might prevent successful installation though. The compatibility guide has no entry for hardware health.

[Alistar]

Hi,

try logging in to the host you are trying to remediate via SSH as a root and do a tail -f /var/log/esxupdate.log - you should see on what exactly the installation has failed. If possible also please post the screenshot of the failure of the SSH session here so we can take a look.

[ysalimi]

Hello,

Try to use VMware ESXi 5.5 Image provided  by DELL

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=5YC4T

keep us in touch.

Best

[Speedbird186]

Thanks for the suggestion. I am in fact using the Dell customized ISO.

[Speedbird186]

Hi,

I didn't see anything in that log that indicated a problem. I don't know what I did differently now (I think I may have powered off a VM that had a local ISO connected) but it just upgraded successfully.

Thanks for the suggestions.

SA.

[Alistar]

Haha yeah I guess it was a lock on the .iso file then that prevented the ESXi host to safely shut off Glad you're upgraded now, enjoy!