A few weeks ago, a customer of mine was attempting an embedded vCenter upgrade from 6.7U3 to 7.0. Stage 1’s deployment of a new vCenter appliance was successful, however Stage 2 (on the new appliance) was failing while attempting to perform a pre-check. We checked the requirements-upgrade-runner.log file and found an error, but it’s quite vague: lookup.fault.EntryNotFoundFault.

We worked together and checked the following:

• SSO admin password contained only supported characters.
• DNS forward and reverse lookups.
• Source vCenter configuration (Network, etc.)
• Logs on source vCenter Server and the pre-check logs.

We couldn’t find anything that would highlight an issue with the vCenter Server. The customer raised an SR with VMware GSS and after a few puzzled inquiries and log bundles sent, it was escalated to engineering to investigate. The customer had to reconfigure vSphere HA on some clusters under management of the problematic vCenter Server. Interestingly, we got the following error message:

I had a look around internally and found the error described in this KB: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/76584. Long story short, the KB states that the embedded PSC services may be in read-only mode preventing several core vCenter activities from behaving. As the ‘LookupService’ is a core service in the PSC and is being interrogated (and probably updated) by the vCenter upgrade wizard, I asked the customer to check the state of the embedded PSC. It was in read-only mode. Following the KB above, we set the PSC back to active mode and tried the upgrade again. Huzzah! Success! The pre-check wasn’t failing anymore!