Let me preface this by saying that this is not my first vSphere upgrade.  I’m comfortable with the procedures and I’m confident in my ability.   I still broke the network.  But, like a good admin should, I own up to it.  It was my fault.  But, also like a good admin, I tracked down the outage and fixed it.  Pointing fingers and redirecting blame doesn’t get the packets flowing again.  Ok, I’ve got that out of the way so you can’t look upon me with scorn.

It all started during a monthly maintenance cycle.  This month, I was deploying a new vCenter 5.5 Server Appliance (VCSA) to replace our non-virtualized Windows 2008 vCenter 5.1 Server.  I didn’t really care about historical data, and recreating permissions and so forth is relatively simple in this particular environment, so my plan was to stand up a new VCSA, disconnect the hosts from the old vCenter and connect them to VCSA.  Next, I used VUM to upgrade the hosts from 5.1 to 5.5.

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