Sunday, March 1, 2015

ESXI 5.5u2 Hangs during upgrade from 5.1

Quick post:

 If you're upgrading from ESXi 5.1 to 5.5 Update 2, and you don't have all of the network ports hooked up on your host, you may hang the upgrade process in an infinite loop.

 After upgrading two other hosts from 5.1 to 5.5U2 within ~30 minutes, I was concerned that the third server was still at it after 2 hours.

 Watching the console carefully from KVM showed it complain for about 5 seconds about a missing MAC address.  Looking at the server's physical connections, it did indeed have one network port not connected.  Most of my servers are Dell Blades, so all network ports are always hooked up, however, I don't completely trust putting all of my computing in one box, so I still retain a fairly beefy external server in case my blade enclosure ever bites it.

 This particular server had been running for years with that port unplugged, but it only now posed a problem.

 Connecting the port solved the issue.

 Now if the vCenter Web Client didn't suck so badly, I'd be having a good night. :-)

No comments:

Post a Comment