There are numerous threads floating around the VMware communities forums about a problem upgrading ESXi hosts from recent HP customized 5.5 ISOs. I ran into this issue doing an upgrade for a customer and thought I would document the way I was able to fix it. Some other members in the forums confirmed that this worked for them as well. If you run into this, these steps should get you back on track in pretty short order!

The Problem

This problem also happens if upgrading right from hard media, but since I used VUM, that’s what I’m going to document. After you’ve imported your custom ISO into Update Manager, you will go scan the hosts you plan to upgrade and see a warning in the Upgrades field showing it is incompatible. If you check into the error, you see this message:

The upgrade contains the following set of conflicting VIB’s: [what you see here may vary slightly, but this always relates to Broadcom NX drivers]

The problem here seems to have something to do with the version numbers being out-of-order. Or an older version is actually included in this newer ISO. Either way, if you try to upgrade this host, you will likely encounter a failure and not make it through the upgrade process. Checking the “remove third-party blah blah blah” box doesn’t seem to push the upgrade through in this case. So we need to fix it!

The Solution