Hi all,
I ran into this issue earlier today using the following file - VMware-ESXi-5.5.0-Update1-1746018-HP-5.74.27-Jun2014.iso on a 5.0 U3 host while using VUM.
I rolled back to the following file VMware-ESXi-5.5.0-Update1-1623387-HP-5.73.21-Mar2014.iso and got passed the vibs error and was able to complete the in-place upgrade to ESXi 5.5.