Upgrading vCenter Appliance 5.5 to 6.0 – Migration failed error

Today working in our vCloud Air Technical Marketing Lab I was upgrading the vCenter Server Appliance from version 5.5 to 6.0 and I came across an interesting issue.  Totally by my own creation, but interesting none the less.

First of all, I want to thank @anthonyspiteri for his excellent article showing the steps on how to upgrade your vCenter Server Appliance.  Read it here

The major difference with this upgrade is that you don’t just update the exisiting vCenter Appliance like in previous versions.  The upgrade wizard actually deploys a whole new appliance and migrates all the data from the previous version.  Its pretty cool and when you configure it correctly, works very well.

Upgrading vCenter Appliance 5.5 to 6.0

The error I experienced was about half way through the migration, when it failed with the error “Migration Failed”.  It also failed to download the support bundle logs too.

upgrading vcenter appliance 5.5 to 6.0

Turns out I hadn’t read the instructions properly.  You have to have a port group created with the port binding set to Ephemeral.  My existing vCenter Server Appliance was attached to a dvSwitch port group with the port binding set to static.  Also, I had no port groups that were configured as Ephemeral.  The only one was a VM Network port group on a vSwitch, which had no uplinks (see where I am going here).  The wizard defaults to the port groups that are Ephemeral.  (I really should have paid more attention).

upgrading vcenter appliance 5.5 to 6.0

The solution is really simple.  Create a new port group and set the port binding to Ephemeral.  I then moved my existing vCenter Server Appliance to that port group as well.

upgrading vcenter appliance 5.5 to 6.0

Second time around, after making sure everything was configured correctly the upgrade went sucesffuly and I now have a fully working VMware vCenter Server 6.0.  Now time to upgrade the hosts.

upgrading vcenter appliance 5.5 to 6.0

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One Response to Upgrading vCenter Appliance 5.5 to 6.0 – Migration failed error

  1. Casey March 18, 2016 at 3:53 pm #

    I am having a similar issue upgrading but i am not able to find the setting where i set port binding on my port groups.

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