Mastering vSphere 7: A Guide to Upgrading vCenter 6.7 to 7 Update 3 

Thanks for the great feedback Matt. Excellent let me know if you have any questions when you do it

Hi cs512tr, you're welcome, glad you enjoyed it :)

Hi Jagadish, you're welcome, thank you for the great feedback :)

Hi Samir, you're welcome :)

Thank you, you're welcome :)

Hi Christopher, 100% agree as I'm using a nested setup I'am referencing the underlying vcenter due to this being a lab environment. But as you said in a production environment you would browse straight to the esxi host to perform virtual machine tasks on the vcenter vm.

Hi Ross, thank you. It's coming soon, have a busy week this week, and will look to get it finalized in 1 to 2 weeks time.

Hi Juicee, thanks for the kind words. I don't have one at this stage for enhanced linked mode, however I plan to create one with vcenter 7 to 8 upgrades

Hi Naresh, you're welcome :)

Hi Mark, you don't really need to have all your vm's setup with PTR's for the upgrade. If you have added in your hosts to vcenter using DNS then yes it's a good idea to have forward and reverse entries setup for the hosts

@@sysadmintutorials yes sorry meant hosts

Hi Trev, you can increase the vcpu's, ram and storage anytime to match the spec in the table. I might do a quick video on increasing the disk size of certain partitions as it can be a little tricky.

@@sysadmintutorials excellent

Hi Ahmed, you're welcome thanks for stopping by

Thank you Mohammed

Thank you Neon, I don't have one yet but I think I might put it on my list :)

Hi John, you're welcome, I think it took about 15-20 mins, but that's in my lab and not on the fastest disks :)

Thank you Nidaren

Hi Ger, you can never have too many backups :) However I have found that rolling back to a VM snapshot always works. If you can shutdown the vcenter first and then take a snapshot, it's even better.

Hi there, no you need to upgrade vcenter first

Yes that is correct, vcenter first followed by esxi hosts

@@sysadmintutorials thank you !!

Hi Steve, yes it will keep same ip and same hostname

Hi there, yes you can check your existing vcpu and ram allocation on the VM and then compare it to this table: magander.se/vmware-vcenter-server-6-7-resource-requirements/

Hi Eamon, yes you are spot on, you can also add vCenter to AD which will be added as a computer object

Hi Jose, you will need to check the version compatibility between vcenter, esxi and vmware replication first - interopmatrix.vmware.com/

Hi Robby, thank you. I don't have an upgrade video with multiple vcenters, but I think it will be a good video in the future. When you say each vCenter has it's own PSC, you mean it's embedded or the PSC is external ?

@@sysadmintutorials external PSCs

In vCenter 7 all PSC's have to be embedded so you need to plan for this, the upgrade is to do 1 at a time. Is your environment on 6.5 or 6.7 ?

@@sysadmintutorials yeah, that's what I read in the documentation. I think it's good that they consolidated both appliances (VCSA & PSC) into one. Fewer appliances to manage and patch. Do you know if the 7.0 upgrade process will take both appliances and consolidate them during the upgrade or do we have to decom the PSC through a separate process? Thank you

6.5

Hi Beto, I'm not sure the exact versions of vcenter and esxi you are using, but what you need to do is go to the VMware Compatibility website, enter in your vcenter version and your esxi version and it will tell you if it is compatible - interopmatrix.vmware.com/Interoperability

@@sysadmintutorials You are a GOAT thanks so much!!! I will subscribe immediately!!!

Awesome Beto thanks for your support :)

Hi Kamran, thank you. Yes you can upgrade from 6.7.3 to 7.0.3, vcenter first then hosts. Make sure you check your host hardware compatibility on the VMware matrix before upgrading though just so you don't get caught out if something isn't supported. Yes you are correct, you need to upgrade your licenses to support vsphere 7

Hi Hutzi, while both vcenter servers are on, the original vcenter is using a static IP, the destination vcenter is using a temp IP that you set during the upgrade wizard. During the process can you ping the temp IP ? Once the original vcenter gets shutdown, the original source IP gets configured on the new destination vcenter. You should be able to ping this. If not double check the network that you set for the vcenter NIC

@@sysadmintutorials You are such a cool dude for giving advice on your videos months after publishing them. Great stuff man! Appreciate your thoughts! To the actual problem and if anyone ever comes across this. The issue was the new vCenter was setup using static IP but the old one was configured using DHCP and in the moment the new vcenter wants to swap to the IP of the old vcenter it will also swap to DHCP (which of course was reserved for the MAC of the old vcenter, so it failed). How I got to know this? In a console session (using the old vcenter to console access the new one) you can toggle the console view with F1 and F2 between the default "known" vcenter screen and the actual shell. I logged into the shell and in /var/log/vmware/upgrade I found a log that said that the server was trying to apply DHCP. I was really confused but when I was looking at the old vcenter I saw it actually was configured using DHCP.... The solution was to change the old vcenter to static IP; after that the upgrade went through just like the one in the video :)

DHCP will do that :) Great find and well done for sorting it out and getting that upgrade done successfully

Hi there, unfortunately not, you'll need to convert your original licenses to vsphere 7 which can be done in the myvmware.com portal

Hi Russ, you could look at a backup and restore of vcenter. For example something along the lines of 1. backup current vcenter in London, also export VDS, also shutdown vcenter and take a snapshot (should be plenty of backups here :) 2. Deploy a new VCSA in Dublin with the 'Restore' option (make sure this VCSA is exactly the same version and build 3. Point to the backup file and let the new VCSA install and restore from backup 4. Voila, it's moved :)

@@sysadmintutorials Thank you for the reply. In the end I built a completely new vCenter in Dublin and the London one was decommissioned.

That will work :) Glad you got it all sorted

Correct, you just mount the iso file in Windows and run through the upgrade which then goes through and deploys the new vcenter 7 virtual machine for you

Hi Nadeem, take a snapshot of your vcenter before the update. No impact to VM's or no need to migrate vm's. Only need to migrate VM's when you are upgrading ESXi

Hi SCDeerAddict, yes usually you'll need to start back and it's also safer. I've had that error before and it was because the vcenter name was upper case and the ID was lower case. The fix is to edit the vcenter name to match the ID. However I logged a VMware tech support ticket to help me on that one. I would suggest also doing that.

@@sysadmintutorials Thanks for the reply, so I just cancel and manually delete the deployed appliance from stage 1?

I would turn off the failed one. Make sure you can revert to the snapshot copy of your original source vcenter, ensure it powers up and everything is ok. Once you are satisfied the original is working, you could delete the failed one and re-attempt the upgrade again.

@sysadmintutorials oh ok, I didn't think anything was changed on the source vcenter until stage 2 starts, I never started stage 2 because pre check had error, but I did take a offline snap. Thanks again

Hi Talassio, you can't use VAMI for upgrading between major versions as a new appliance needs to be deployed

@@sysadmintutorials thanks :)

Hi Arun, if you want to keep the same vcenter vm name, I would rename the old one before performing the update, something along the lines of vcenter-old. Once the old vcenter has been renamed, you can then use the same vm name in the vcenter 7 migration wizard

@@sysadmintutorials yeah i did that last week and successfully migrated. Thank you!

Excellent great to hear Arun, well done

@@sysadmintutorials i was reading articles and they say if migration fails, roll back plan is to just turn on the old vcenter thats it. Have u tried this or any clue? :)

Hi Arun, yes exactly. you can just turn off the failed vcenter and turn on the old vcenter.

Hi Goncalo, by any chance is your 6.7 deployment using external PSC's ?

Wait... if my vcenters are linked it won’t work?

Hi Sickling, if they are linked you can run the upgrade. However you need to make sure that the PSC's are internal and not external

@@sysadmintutorials Oh shoot.... I have no idea how to verify that or what PSC's are/or what they're used for. Edit: verified it's embedded and not managed! yay.

Awesome, it's much easier with embedded :)

Hi Charles, yes you get a trial for 60 days if you don't license the vcenter. You can download vcenter from customerconnect.vmware.com/en/downloads/info/slug/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/7_0

@@sysadmintutorials Thanks for your reply. 👍 I have my lab on v6.7. All my licences (2 exsi and one vcenter) without expiration. I tried again with your link but as soon as I logged in, don't let me download anything from the v7 downloads section.😒

yes you'll need to upgrade your licenses to 7. Sorry here is the link to the vcenter eval customerconnect.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=vsphere-eval-7

@@sysadmintutorials Thanks

Hi Robert, ok sounds good