Hi there,
I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade our VI3 to VI3.5. Our ESX Servers and VirtualCenter were installed fresh from version 3.0.2 of ESX Server and 2.0.2 of VirtualCenter, and the upgrade was performed on these to 3.5.
I read through the upgrade guide thoroughly before performing the upgrade, and followed the steps exactly. As far as I was aware, the upgrade appeared to go smoothly with the only hitch being the install of VirtualCenter 2.5, when it prompts you for a password so it can install the appropriate plugins, the install of these plugins failed, since the password I was using, had 'special characters' like a semicolon. Apart of this problem all appeared fine on the ESX Server side, with me doing the upgrade by booting off the CD.
After successfully configuring VC to reconnect to the servers, I began starting up the virtual machines. Now here's the weird part: most of the Virtual machines started fine, but a few of them refused to start with the error message:
"The attempted operation could not be performed in the current state (Powered Off)".
Apart of this error I can't find any other reason why these VMs won't start (i.e. I can't find any log files or detailed error message). I've read through other threads on this forum to no avail, and tried several different configurations. I've waited; rebooted the ESX Server and VirtualCenter; tried to clone the VM; tried to take snapshots of it, but the VM and its clones refuse to start giving the same error message. I've also checked that the VMs are not pointing to erroneous ISO/FLP image files. What confuses me is that I have 20 VM's that are identical to each other (they were deployed off the same template with the same VMTool version), and 5 of these won't boot up, the others boot up fine. If I shift the problem VM's between different ESX Servers, they don't boot up either. We don't use VMotion, rather each of the VMs are stored on a local store of that machine. Has anybody got any ideas regarding this upgrade problem?
My second problem involves VirtualCenter 2.5 and guest customization. When using VC 2.0.2, the guest customization ran perfectly. I extracted sysprep 1.1 in the appropriate folder, and VC detected the files and used them properly. After the upgrade to VC 2.5, none of the Guest Customizations work, with the warning message: "Warning: Windows customization resources were not found on the server". I've quadruple checked that the Sysprep 1.1 is indeed in the correct place as far as the documentation is concerned (in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\sysprep\1.1), and cannot find any VC 2.5 documentation saying something has changed (unless I'm blind). I've also tried downloading deploy.cab and placing them in the appropriate folder, to no avail.
If anyone could help me with these problems would be much appreciated, since I'm not looking forward to being on the phone for hours to make an official support call.
Thanks in advance,
Gene