Upgrade Vcenter 5.5 to 6.5 with View composer as well

[jwmx]

Needing to upgrade a Vcenter 5.5 (installed on Windows Server) to 6.5.  I would like to just upgrade the Vcenter in place.  That part seems easy.  This also has VMware View tied to it.  Will this break?  I have several 5.5 hosts that we are also migrating away from.  I 3 new hosts with 6.5 installed, but as you know my current Vcenter will not manage them until the upgrade.  Can I upgrade to 6.5 manage current 5.5 and 6.5 hosts, do the migration and then down the old hosts?

[TechMassey · Accepted solution]

First, the key item is that vCenter doesn't care about Horizon View and isn't even aware of it. View is just making API calls to vCenter to run tasks, the focus is not on vCenter but Horizon View. The roadblock people typically hit when upgrading the vCenter with Horizon View is the hostname. If you are upgrading and keeping the hostname, you can pull this off with little pain.

1. First, you need to verify your version of View is compatible with vSphere 6.5: VMware Product Interoperability Matrices​
   1. For instance, version 6.x is not.
2. Then, if you are changing the certificate or CA, that the connection server and composer server trust the CA.
3. Finally, you can keep view running during the upgrade. Best to just shutdown composer, and disable provisioning on all pools.

Worse case, you may have to remove and re-add the vCenter server in View Admin. Congrats you avoided the worst which is dealing with a new vCenter hostname and updating all your pools to point to it.

ProTip - PowerCLI for View is excellent if you needed to mass update the pools.

[jwmx]

Thank you very much for the answer Warren!