I ran into this with a customer this week and felt it was a good note to point out for those that are migrating customers or themselves to a new version of vCenter. In this particular case, the customer was upgrading from vCenter 5.1 to 6.5 through another 5.5 upgrade, and additionally was going to migrate from the Windows-based vCenter to the VCSA.
Like many NetApp customers that have been using NetApp as their datastore storage platform, the customer had the Virtual Storage Console (VSC) plugin for vCenter setup and running many backup jobs. The VSC software is installed on a Windows server and typically, customers that were running vCenter on Windows also installed the VSC on the same Windows server. This is fine except when the upgrade path will take the customer from the Windows-based vCenter to the appliance, where the vCenter migration will shut down the existing vCenter to make use of the original IP address and FQDN. In turn, this kills the VSC server at the same time.
The best practice would be to migrate the VSC to a new server prior to do the upgrades, at least the migration from the WIndows-based vCenter to the appliance. The following article published below by NetApp still works in this scenario. But in short, you’re going to want to take a backup copy of the Repository directory that resides in the Virtual Storage Console directory under Program Files (C:\Program Files\NetApp\Virtual Storage Console\SMVI\server\repository).
With that backup, you just need to make sure that you stop the two services for NetApp VSC, copy the directory to the new server, and start the services back up. I did not need to restart the vCenter server or services, but your mileage may vary as it is mentioned in the NetApp article.
https://kb.netapp.com/app/answers/answer_view/a_id/1030422
Thanks and good luck!
Matt