So, I was trying out a Windows vCenter 5.5 to VCSA 6.5 appliance migration and at the stage where I enter the target ESX host name where the appliance will be deployed to I got the above error.
Wasted the better part of my day troubleshooting this as I could find absolutely no mention of what was causing this. The installer log had the following but that didn’t shed much light either.
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2016-12-20T07:09:08.422Z - info: THUMBPRINT(Target): 2D:99:0E:AA:6A:6E:96:B3:D1:7B:9F:4D:E6:6A:1A:15:80:D0:0C:D9 2016-12-20T07:09:10.527Z - info: login() to 10.140.211.3 2016-12-20T07:09:10.528Z - info: initializing vsphere API connection to 10.140.211.3:443 2016-12-20T07:09:40.564Z - error: vimService creation failed: Error |
Tried stuff like 1) try a different ESX host, 2) update it to a later version (it was 5.5 Build 3568722), 3) turn on the ESX Shell and SSH in case that mattered – but nothing helped!
Nothing came up regarding the “vimService creation failed: Error” line either. But then I began Googling on “vimService” and learnt that it is the vSphere Management SDK and that you access the SDK via a URL like https://servername/sdk. That got me thinking whether the VCSA installer looks to the proxy settings of the machine where I am running it from, so I turned off the proxy settings in IE – and that helped!
Who would have thought. :)