‘Data transfer and appliance setup is in progress’ after VCSA upgrade backout

This is as much a reminder for me as for anyone else, having come across this a couple of times and always struggled to find the KB article on how to resolve it

If you perform a migration upgrade on a VCenter Server Appliance, such as from 6.7 to 7.0, and the upgrade fails on the new appliance necessitating a backout, it is common to get a ‘data transfer and appliance setup is in progress’ message on the original appliance

There is a KB article to walk you through resolving this: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/67179

In particular the final steps where you ‘touch’ three files in the /var/log/vmware/upgrade directory seem to be the main requirement in my experience

Once this has been performed, a simple refresh of the page will return you to a normal login interface