NOTE: Since this article was written, KB83145 has been created which helps resolve the issue caused by this file and a few possible others.
I finally decided to upgrade my home lab to vSphere 7. First thing is always to upgrade vCenter. I had some issues with my 6.7 VCSA, specifically, that I lost the root password and kinda broke it when trying to recover. No big deal, I don’t use dvSwitches at home and I only have 9 VMs, so no great loss to set up a new vCenter.
After powering off the old VCSA, I deployed the lastest VCSA 7.0u1 image. Everything went well. The next day, I found out the 7.0u1a patch had been released. Since I hadn’t done more than add the vSphere hosts to vCenter, I jumped into the VAMI to perform an automatic upgrade. 7.0u1a was right there waiting for me. I selected it and started the upgrade.
About 30 seconds after starting the upgrade, I received this error:
I googled for “Exception occurred in install precheck phrase” and didn’t see any result for this at all. Everything that looked close was way off. Hitting Resume just started the upgrade again, asking me to cancel or proceed. The cancel button did nothing, and the proceed button led right back to this error.
I tried rebooting the VCSA, figuring maybe it just needed a fresh boot. Logging into the VAMI – after the reboot – showed the same error. In addition, it grays out the left-hand menu. If you change the URL to remove the navigation (https://vcsa/ui) you do get back to the menu, but any attempt to perform another upgrade leads to the same cycle.
After deleting this VCSA and deploying another 7.0u1 instance from scratch, I encountered the same error! Again, google failed me, even a few days later. Thankfully, someone on the VMware{code} slack pointed me to an article on Paul Braren’s blog.
Though the error was somewhat different, the resolution worked for me! Paul’s post goes through the detail of how he ran into the problem and leads to an ultimate resolution of removing the file /etc/applmgmt/appliance/software_update_state.conf. Once I removed this file, I was able to navigate to and perform and upgrade in the VAMI.
I could, of course, have simply downloaded a new image of the VCSA and deploy it, but in production we don’t often have this luxury. We have to fix what’s out there instead of starting from scratch. I hope that by writing this post, which builds on Paul’s excellent work, this error message pulls up at least one result for you. Take that, denvercoder9!
rnelson0 
Nice! Glad you worked it out.
It’s always frustrating when you’re on the bleeding edge and there are no KB articles. 😬
This solution did not work when trying to upgrade from version 7.0.1.00000 to 7.0.1.00100
That was the upgrade I performed, where the 7.0.1.00000 was a fresh install. While this was the fix for me, I’m sure it isn’t for everyone, so please let me know what your ultimate outcome is and I can update the article. Best of luck!
Worked for me, thank you!
Worked for me too, thank you!!
Did not work for me either upon encountering it while trying to upgrade 7.0.1.0000. I swear, VCSA is such bug-ridden trash sometimes that it’s ridiculous.
Thanks, worked for me!
Thanks, worked for me!
Going from 7.0.1.00100 to 7.0.1.00200 only worked after deleting the file and then staging the update first, then after it was staged I was able to install it. If I selected stage+install option it would keep failing even after deleting the file.
Came here to post this as well. So delete the file above, then stage, then do the install.
Upgrading from 7.0.1.00100 to 7.0.1.00200 had the same issue, and the same fix worked for me. I tried to just delete the file and then click the proceed button but that did not work. You have to go right out of the upgrade process and start again then all went smoothly from there on in. Many thanks.
Thanks, it got the VAMI out of that hell loop.
I think in my case I was running the update as STAGE and INSTALL, I then staged first and installed, and all went well.
Perfect! Ran into the exact issue, and a nice and easy fix!
I found that doing the one step ‘Stage and Install’ would still fail after removing the file. However if I ‘Staged’ the update first, and then installed the update, in two steps it worked.
This is a great article. My personal experience has been that if you perform a “Stage Only” and then the “Install” as two separate steps the process completes everytime. I have tested this about 40 times while I was building a personalized vSphere 7 class. No need to delete the file.
I will add if you run into the error above and get caught in the “loop” then you will / may need to SSH into the vCenter server and delete (make a backup first) the file and reboot the vCenter server before proceeding with the update.
VMware now has KB https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/83145 on the issue, but I also used Paul Braren’s blog link which allowed me to re-attempt the update. Thank you!