Error 1711 When Upgrading vCenter to 5.1

• Matt Liebowitz
• September 28, 2012September 28, 2012
• 1
• 956

I was recently going through the process of upgrading my home lab from vSphere 5.0 to 5.1.  Everything was going great until I got the following error:

Error 1711. An error occurred while writing installation information to disk.  Check to make sure enough disk space is available, and click Retry, or Cancel to end the installation.

I found a few references online to a bad MSI file when this happened to folks in previous versions of VMware products (not limited to vCenter apparently).  Then on Twitter, Shawn Bass (@shawnbass) told me he had this happen to him in the past and it also turned out to be a bad download.  I figured that was more credibility than a random forum post.

I was pretty skeptical that that would work, but I decided to download the 3GB ISO file for vCenter 5.1 again.  The result?

Thanks to Shawn and others for pointing me in this direction.  I was skeptical but it worked!  Hopefully this helps anyone searching for this error since I didn’t really find anything definitive when I went looking.

Quick update – some folks have asked if I verified the MD5 checksum after the download. Very good and valid question and the answer is no.  However, I still have both the “bad” ISO file as well as the newly downloaded ISO file that eventually worked.  In both cases the MD5 checksum was valid.

If I had to guess, the corruption happened at some point when copying files from my laptop to my NAS, from my NAS to my vCenter VM, from vCenter VM to ESXi datastore, etc.  I’m guessing at some point during that process (complicated lab setup, don’t ask) the file got corrupted in some way. On the second download I went directly from my laptop where it was downloaded directly to the ESXi datastore.

My home lab setup is annoying, with only a weak wireless signal connecting my laptop/desktop to the lab downstairs.  Copying files from my laptop to the lab takes a while and I can’t shut it down until it’s done so I try to avoid doing that. Lesson learned for the future I guess.