Troubleshooting VxRail Upgrade 8.0.321 → 8.0.361: 504 Gateway Timeout During Bundle Upload

Last week, I started upgrading a simple vSphere environment running VxRail 8.0.321 to VxRail 8.0.361—a setup without VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). It looked like an easy, routine job. The week before, I had already updated all related components without a problem:

• vCenter Server
• Aria Operations
• Aria Log Insight
• Standalone ESXI hosts

Everything was running smoothly and update report was all green… until I uploaded the VxRail 8.0.361 bundle. After the bundle was extracted, the upgrade window suddenly displayed this message:

504 Gateway Time-Out
Eroor extracting upgrade bundle XXXX. Failed to upload bundle. See the log file for more details

Unfortunately, the log file wasn’t very helpful. The only clue I found was: Failed to set customized depots

That small detail marked the start of my investigation.

Step 1: Check vCenter Tasks

Looking at the vCenter task list, I noticed that the sync operation was taking more than 10 minutes to complete. This was unusual and hinted at a timeout problem between VxRail Manager and the VMware depot.

Step 2: Understand the Change After Broadcom Acquisition

Since Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware, the VMware depot architecture has been redesigned. You now need to authenticate using a token to access the depot. This process significantly increases sync time during updates or bundle verification.

As a result, the VxRail Manager timeout can expire before the depot sync finishes, triggering the 504 Gateway Time‑Out error.

Step 3: Apply One of Two Fixes

You have two possible solutions to resolve this issue:

1. Increase the VxRail Manager timeout
   Dell provides an official solution in this Knowledge Base article (Dell account required).
2. Temporarily disable the Broadcom depot
   This was the quicker workaround I used. Disabling the depot temporarily allowed the upload to complete successfully.

Key Takeaway

If your VxRail upgrade fails with a 504 Gateway Time‑Out and mentions “Failed to set customized depots”, it’s likely due to the new Broadcom authentication mechanism causing long depot sync times. Adjusting the timeout or temporarily disabling the depot will resolve the issue.

Hopefully, this saves someone a few hours of troubleshooting.

Cheers,
Valentin