How to upgrade VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with PVSCSI controller incompatibility?

If you are running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) in a lab using Nested ESXi and you attempt an upgrade workflow, you may find the following upgrade pre-check fail with the following message: VSAN SCSI controller is not VMware certified

You might think you are out of luck, but it is actually pretty straight forward to bypass the checks and still allow the upgrade to proceed, something I recently went through myself when upgrading my VCF 5.1.1 environment to the latest 5.2 release.

Note: To use vSAN ESA in VCF, you should configure your Nested ESXi VM to use an NVMe Controller instead of PVSCSI Controller, so its possible that by changing the controller type, you may not run into this error simliar to findings here. You can also override the vSAN HCL JSON with your own custom HCL JSON which includes the PVSCSI controller by following the blog post here and that would also allow you to proceed, but steps below are the easiest as you do not have to do anything special.

There are two places where you will see the PVSCSI controller check occur, once during the VCF upgrade pre-check and once again during vSphere Lifecycle Management (vLCM) image compliance check.

VCF upgrade pre-check

During the VCF upgrade pre-check, click on the Errors tab and then select vSAN SCSI Controller pre-check and you will have the option to silence the pre-check.

You have a few options of silencing the pre-check, I just did it for all vSphere Clusters within my VCF Management Domain vCenter Server.

It is still expected that in the vSphere UI, that you will still see the error message about PVSCSI controller, but you can ignore.

At this point, assuming you do not have any other VCF upgrade pre-check errors, you will be allowed to begin the VCF upgrade process.

vSphere Lifecycle Management (vLCM) Pre-Check

During the vSphere Lifecycle Management (vLCM) image compliance check, you will come across the error again complaining about the PVSCSI controller and while you might think this is stopping you from proceeding, you can actually continue.

Immediately after this screen, you can still click on the Schedule Update button and then you will be taken the standard upgrade wizard and the "trick" is to simply continue the upgrade and check the box below to acknowledge that you have confirmed the HCL verification manually and once you do that, the upgrade of your ESXi host will start which is the last part of the VCF upgrade workflow! 😀