I am in the process of upgrading three vCenter Servers on 5.5 to 6. SSO was embedded on all three and SSO has been recently externalized to Windows Servers. The next step is to use the vCenter Server Migration Tool to migrate each SSO 5.5 server to PSC 6 appliance.

I went through the migration wizard and the migration was on its way. The PSC was deployed and the progress bar on the migration was moving along. However, when I opened the console for the PSC, there was an error; Upgrade EXPORT failed. Then the migration never finished.

I ran the migration again with VMware support since they did not know what could be causing the issue. I opened up the console for the PSC as soon as it was deployed and there was a quick message to look at UpgradeRunner.log. However, there was nothing useful in that log. Then checked out upgrade-export.log.

There were network related errors in upgrade-export.log. I knew I inputted everything correctly into the migration wizard and there was nothing that would block communication between anything involved. The IPv6 address in the log stuck out to me. The SSO Windows Server had a IPv6 address, but the wizard never asked for anything IPv6 related. I disabled IPv6 on the SSO server, ran the migration again, and everything went well.

Here’s one way to view the PSC’s logs. At the PSC’s console, hit Alt+F1. Then type the commands below.

shell.set –enabled True
shell
cd /var/log/vmware/upgrade
less upgrade-export.log

Moral of the story is to disable IPv6 on all VMware related servers before using the vCenter Server Migration Tool. Then enable it after everything is on 6. This is just to be safe in case any other of the upgrades or migrations have similar issues. VMware support said they will have a knowledge base article on this issue. When they do, I will edit this article with a link so everyone can check out the latest directly from VMware.