We have the Essentials licenses. I upgraded the vCenter appliance to 5.5 and installed Upgrade Manager. Upgrade Manager and vCenter are all on different hosts than the one I first tried to upgrade. This host is on an IBM System x3650 M3. I was unable to find an IBM ISO for 5.5 U3, so I used the VMware ISO with the assurance from the documentation that the IBM stuff that was already installed would migrate from 5.1 to 5.5.
When I did the upgrade with Upgrade Manager, I did not check the box to ensure success by uninstalling 3rd party stuff. My thought was that it might uninstall the IBM stuff I wanted to keep. I manually powered off the VMs before starting. The upgrade got to 25% and then it said the host was disconnected. After waiting some time, I gave up and physically went to the host (located in a different building but not too far away, fortunately). I arrived in time to see it finish booting up. It said version 5.5.
Then I opened the vSphere client and saw that it was still disconnected. So I connected directly to the host instead of the vCenter appliance. It connected, but there were no VMs listed. I had to manually import them back in from the datastore. This worked for the ones locally stored, but some of them were on shared storage that is usually connected via iSCSI. At this point I realized that the host configuration that was appearing was from years ago, when I had different virtual network switches and no iSCSI. I changed things as necessary to get the local VMs working, and then realized I could import the ones on shared storage into another host and run them from there at least temporarily. That worked fine (I did have to tell vCenter they had been "moved" rather than "copied") and all the vital VMs were up.
I'm struggling to get iSCSI working. I'm configuring it the same way it is on my other hosts, but for some reason in the details under Storage Adapters, it's showing that I'm connected to the enclosure rather than to the disks.
vSwitchUSB0 (vusb0) that appears automatically on all my other hosts no longer exists on this one. vusb0 does still show under Network Adapters, but I don't have the option to recreate the switch. Do I need this?
Also, I don't know how many patches may still need to be applied to 5.5 U3. Upgrade Manager is still listing the newly upgraded host as being out of compliance with patches going back to 5.0.
I'm also a little worried about updating the other hosts, because I don't think things went normally with this one and I'm not quite sure what I should have done differently (would not checking the box have caused the problems I described?). I am thinking the next time I probably just want to be onsite and put the CD in to upgrade.