vCenter Upgrade Pre-Check Fails Due to Temporary IP Address Conflict

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

During the vCenter upgrade pre-check, the process reports an authentication failure while validating access to the source appliance operating system. The upgrade status shows a failure at the pre-upgrade stage, indicating that the source appliance OS cannot be authenticated.

 

Environment

7.0.x

8.0.x

Cause

A temporary IP address used during the vCenter upgrade pre-check is already assigned to another virtual machine. Even though the virtual machine is on a different port group or VLAN, the duplicate IP causes a conflict, leading to the authentication failure.

hostd.log

Resolution

Identify the virtual machine that is using the duplicate temporary IP address and power it off or release the IP address. Once the IP conflict is cleared, rerun the pre-upgrade check to confirm that the validation completes successfully.