Soooo that whole thing didn't work so plan B which was much easier. I built a vm for sso and its db (used the bundled sql for ssodb), inventory service, and vcenter server, another vm for vcenter db (used full sql 2008r2), and a 3rd vm for update manager and its db (full sql 2008r2). Installed 5.1 fresh on those vms which reside on the current 4.1 hosts. remoted in to the new vcenter server vm, opened the client and added the hosts to the new vcenter. This disconnected the hosts from the 4.1 physical vcenter server and now all my vms are running under vcenter server 5.1. Now i'm upgrading the esxi hosts to 5.1. Using this method I didn't have to worry about importing and converting any databases with the old data. When the 4.1 hosts were connected to the new vcenter 5.1 server the new database was populated with fresh information. So in short I've gone from a physical 4.1 server where everything was on one server, to a fully vm'd vcserver environment with components separated amongst 3 servers. No errors and zero downtime for my users done during prime business hours. We have about 80 vms on this setup 65ish or so are production servers.
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