@stormi I really appreciate the continued help. I'm not sure it works.
On my single-host pool master—the one I want to join into my half-upgraded pool—I run the command:
xe host-emergency-disable-tls-verification
It returns with no errors.
If I do xe host-param-list and look through the parameters for my host, I see:
tls-verification-enabled ( RO): false
This is the only thing I see documented that can turn off TLS verification. If some other command like pool-uninstall-ca-certificate would have the effect of disabling TLS verification, I can't see that documented anywhere. In fact, even though xe pool-uninstall-ca-certificate appears to be a valid command that my xe binary knows about, I can't find that particular command documented at all.
Even after the emergency-disable-tls-verification, if I attempt to join that host to the half-upgraded pool (using xe pool-join...) I get:
Error code: POOL_JOINING_HOST_TLS_VERIFICATION_MISMATCH
It seems like even though the host has TLS verification off, the fact that its pool has verification enabled is blocking the action.