I'm using ESXi 6.7 free and am running several Server 2012R2 VMs (VM version 14). I wanted to "in place" upgrade to 2019 but it kept hanging (Hard lockup) after the initial reboot.
Every time it failed, it would hang on the reboot (windows logo screen with spinning dots). I could not power off the VM. I would even try to esxcli vm process -kill the world id and it would disappear from the process list but it would still never go down. I had to end up rebooting the ESXi host (shutting down all my VMs) every time it failed, a more than 15 minute experience each time.
Each time after I booted up the VM again, it show a setup failed message with a generic error code that searching the internet for turned up "it could be anything" type of posts.
After days of trying different things, as in uninstalling drivers, VM Tools, stopping start-up services from running, trying different versions of the 2019 install media, etc, as a last resort I went down the list of controllers on my hard drives. First going from LSI SAS to paravirtual, and then to SATA. Once I changed the hard drives to SATA and uninstalled the other SCSI controllers the upgrade process finished fine.
Just an FYI if anyone else runs into this.
Should I change my hard drives back to paravirtual SCSI controllers or just leave them on SATA?
Edit: I forgot to mention that I am running DellEMC-ESXi-6.7.0-8169922 specific image of ESXi.