vCenter upgrade failed Internal Error access denied

I was trying to upgrade vCenter 5.5 U2 to VMware vCenter 6 U1 using mounted ISO. During the pre-upgrade check, it threw an error stating “Internal Error” and asked me to contact VMware support. When you cancel it, it gives you the log bundle for that upgrade.

When I reviewed the vcsUpgrade folder, I found these errors in the logs file:

2016-05-25T15:39:08.529Z INFO upgrade.states.component_states vpxd:CollectRequirements: WindowsError: [Error 5] Access is denied: 'c:\\users\\admini~1\\appdata\\local\\temp\\4\\stdoutirkxog'
 2016-05-25T15:39:08.530Z INFO upgrade.states.component_states vpxd:CollectRequirements: Script completed for 2.12699985504 secs with return-code='1', and executionId=1c4f9d18-17dd-4f40-a218-a3caf515eb44
 2016-05-25T15:39:08.533Z ERROR upgrade.states.component_states vpxd:CollectRequirements: Remote script failed with an error [InternalError()]
 2016-05-25T15:39:08.535Z ERROR upgrade.states.component_states vpxd:CollectRequirements: failed with internal error. For details take a look at CollectRequirements_com.vmware.vpxd_2016_05_25_17_39.log.
 2016-05-25T15:39:08.546Z WARNING wf.wf_processor State CollectRequirements com.vmware.vpxd has failed.
 2016-05-25T15:39:08.555Z WARNING output.requirements_result_producer Component com.vmware.sso result could not be retrieved

 

The user I was logged in as had Local Administrator rights, so it didn’t make sense why the file could not be accessed in Temp folder.

By this point I have checked the following:

• UAC disabled
• Time settings / NTP
• SSO password check to make sure I didn’t put that in wrong.
• Deleted the TEMP folder and re-created another one.
• Re-pointed the temp folder in windows variables to another location

At this point, I got VMware support involved and they looked at ODBC connection settings for the database, Registry settings to see if it’s using SQL auth or Windows. It was nothing to do with any of this.

Then I was told by support that I should completely uninstall vCenter 5.5 Update 2 and install vCenter 5.5 Update 3 before attempting version 6 of vcenter.

After some painful hours we got to vCenter 5.5 Update 3 version but still cannot upgrade to vCenter 6.0 Update 1. We even tried using different ISO and still no luck and continued to troubleshoot. The internal error was such a vague error and didn’t help us out.

 

Resolution:

It turns out the customer had TrendMicro Deep Security installed and was running as service. Every time the upgrade was kicked off, it quarantined temporary files that was copied by VMware vCenter 6.0 install.  I stopped all the Anti-virus service associated with TrendMicro and completely restarted the upgrade process. Voila it worked!

I have done enough upgrades of vCenters but this was so simple but took a serious amount of time to figure out it was simply an Anti-virus stopping the upgrade and causing internal errors.