you can reconnect your esx host and storage but the config of your VDS etc... will be need to be configured again and risking you lose network connectivity etc...
i would recommend the upgrade ofcourse but maybe better to do an upgrade to VCSA 5.1 first then upgrade to 5.5?
the procedure looks te same but maybe this one will work
also make sure you did kb2018760 correctly. maybe the old VCSA cant shut down cause of the new disk being busy.