I fired off a vCenter 5.5 to 6.0 upgrade. It completed the export step, uninstall of vCenter 5.5 step and install of vCenter 6.0 step.
After vCenter 6.0 install step completes, it starts the importing 5.x data step and this immediately fails with a popup of "Failed to stop service vpxd". I looked in services.msc and saw that the vCenter Server service was running when this popup occurred. It wasn't in a stopping state. It seems like the installer never even got to trying to stop the service.
When it tried to roll back, it ended up leaving me with a system with no vCenter installed and some leftover Service entries. The only option I had was to try and run the vCenter 6.0 install again.
I found this article: VMware KB: Recovering from a failed upgrade of vCenter Server 5.1 or 5.5 to 6.0 which says to use this command: VMware-vCenter-Server.exe UPGRADE_FROM_EXPORT_DATA="1".
So I rebooted. I restored my backup of VIM_VCDB from before the upgrade attempt. Then I renamed C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter to -old, as well as renamed C:\Program Files\VMware\vCenter Server to -old and ran VMware-vCenter-Server.exe UPGRADE_FROM_EXPORT_DATA="1".and specified C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\export as the location of the 5.5 export data (which is where it went when the first attempt occurred.
This second attempt installed vCenter 6.0 fine, and then immediately failed again on the import step. When this rolled back, it cleanly uninstalled everything from vCenter. All services, all registry entries, etc. So this left me with a pretty clean system.
Since I had some random leftover bits from the first failure attempt, I figured I'd try one more time. I restored the DB, restored a copy of the \export folder I had made after the first attempt, renamed the vCenter directories again and kicked off an install. And again, it failed at the same import step.
I checked the ODBC, it's correct, there's no trailing spaces. I'm logged in with the same domain account I used to install vCenter 5.5. All the obvious things have been checked and look good.
So, I'm stumped. There are a ton of log files, and I have no clue which one I need to look through for more detail.
Help please!
