vCenter Upgrade Failure due to old stale vCenter VM

Products

• VMware SDDC Manager

Issue/Introduction

• vCenter Major Upgrade through Upgrade Runner mechanism fails during bundle precheck/upgrade with error: vCenter precheck failed while getting the DNS server from VM.
• vCenter Patch Upgrade through RDU with STATIC network configuration can fail during upgrade with error: vCenter upgrade failed at the VCENTER_UPGRADE_PRECHECK stage

Environment

• 3.x to 4.x upgrade followed by 4.x to 5.2.1 Upgrade
• 4.x to 5.x upgrade followed by 5.x to 5.2.1 upgrade using RDU (Reduced Downtime Migration) mechanism and STATIC network configuration for target vCenter.

 

Cause

vCenter Major Upgrade through Upgrade Runner mechanism, does not delete the old vCenter VM post upgrade.

As per VCF design guidelines, the administrator has to delete the old vCenter VM manually post the upgrade. https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Foundation/5.2/vcf-lifecycle/GUID-3B41CF79-C721-4AFC-A263-0672143DF41E.html#GUID-A2E3B776-F64A-42B5-8266-51FF74B96D6C__GUID-13BC04AD-A851-46DD-9DBB-114F609B1551 (Refer Step 9 in Procedure).

If stale vCenter VM is still present during the next upgrade, precheck/upgrade workflow can fail when fetching the DNS Server name or vCenter name. The DNS Server details/source vCenter name is fetched based on IP or FQDN of vCenter. If old vCenter is still present, sometimes old VM reference can be returned resulting in subsequent failure.

Resolution

Manually delete the old stale vCenter VM before initiating the vCenter Upgrade workflow.