"No suitable host in the inventory" error when applying host profile after upgrading vCenter Server to 6.5.0d

Products

VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

Unable to apply the host profile captured from ESXi 5.5 to the upgraded host for the following scenarios:

The host used for reference is upgraded to ESXi 6.x.
The inventory does not have any host at version ESXi 5.5 ( same version it was captured from).
In the %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\VMWare\vCenterServer\logs\vsphere-client logs file, you see entries similar to:

[ERROR] data-service-pool-791 70180422 126989 225566 com.vmware.vsphere.client.hostprofile.HostProfileUtils profileManager.queryMetadata(...) throws error: com.vmware.vim.binding.vim.fault.InvalidProfileReferenceHost: There is no suitable host in the inventory as reference host for the profile Prod 05 Cluster.at sun.reflect.GeneratedConstructorAccessor1825.newInstance(Unknown Source)at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:45)at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:423)at java.lang.Class.newInstance(Class.java:442) [ERROR] http-bio-9090-exec-1795 70180422 126989 225566 com.vmware.vise.core.model.CompositeException (vim.fault.InvalidProfileReferenceHost) {
faultCause = null,
faultMessage = (vmodl.LocalizableMessage)
[ com.vmware.vim.binding.impl.vmodl.LocalizableMessageImpl@57baba61]reason = missingReferenceHost,
host = null,
profile = null,
profileName = Prod 05 Cluster

Note: This log excerpt is an example. Date, time, and environmental variables may vary depending on your environment.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 7.0.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.7.x

Cause

As per the Reference Host Independence section on the host profile documentation for vSphere 6.5, we see that a dedicated reference host is not required to be available to perform host profile tasks. In previous releases, vSphere required that the reference host was available for certain host Profiles tasks, such as editing, importing, and exporting. In addition to that we see that warning indicating that no valid reference host is associated with the profile is expected. Due to the introduction of this feature, users can no longer edit or change the reference host from the vSphere Web Client. The reference host selection occurs at runtime, without notifying users, in the vCenter Server for on-going tasks.

Resolution

This is a known issue affecting vCenter Server 6.50d.

Workaround:

To work around this issue for vSphere 5.5 profile after upgrade to vSphere 6.5:

Select vCenter Server 5.5 profile from the inventory.
Invoke Copy settings from host.
Select the host to upgrade. This upgrade profile version to selected host version.

To work around this issue for other versions:

Retain an ESXi host with the same version as the one used for the creation of the host profile. In case of a host cannot be made available, then we would need a nested ESXi running on a VM in the inventory.

Note: In order to upgrade the host profile, we need to perform the following steps:

Once a host(s) is upgraded, we need to retain a host with the older build (build used to create the profile) to ensure the current profile can be modified
We need to use the option Copy settings from host under Host profile and select the upgraded host to upgrade the profile
Once the profile is upgraded, we need to manually modify the host profile to add/remove the setting relevant to the deployment.

OR,

Manually match the profile configuration from the older version of the ESXi with a profile extracted from the current version. During this, we need to manually un-check the features with the newer release to match with the existing profile. The alternate option is to create a new host profile using the upgraded host and manually modify the required settings.

Additional Information

在将 vCenter Server 升级到 6.5.0d 之后应用主机配置文件时，显示“清单中没有合适的主机 (no suitable host in the inventory)”错误