We are in the process of upgrading to vSphere 6.0 and have installed and configured vCenter 6.0 (embedded employment) on a physical server on Windows Server 2012/SQL 2012.
During our staging, our current production vCenter server died unexpectedly due to hardware error. No option to recover. I can't vmotion or do any of the normal vcenter admin stuff.
The current virtual environment is running vSphere v5.0 on two (2) physical hosts in a cluster with shared SAN storage, and was managed by the dead physical server running Windows with vCenter 5.0.
Normally, I would just disassociate each host from vCenter directly from the Esxi Host in the GUI, and associate it to the new vCenter 6.0 and manage it to continue with my upgrade. However, there is a vDS attached to my hosts, and I have production VM’s running (see image):
Since I have vCenter 6.0 installed and configured, I don’t want to have to rebuild and reinstall vCenter 5.0. We don't care about the DB, plus, the vcenter DB backup may not work at all.
My thoughts was to create a new vSwitch on an available vmnic on each host and move my VM's to the new vSwitch via the Esxi host gui. Ultimately, we would like to get off the DVS switch. But what about the hosts?
I would appreciate any ideas, suggestions on how to best proceed moving to my new vCenter 6.0 server to manage these hosts without breaking everything in the process.
Thanks!
I had the same problem when I was moving from Vsphere 5.5 Update 2 to 6.0. After working with VMware Support for about 72 hours straight we decided to build a brand new Vcenter at 6.0 and unmount the host from one Vcenter to the other.
I was wondering if you have checked out all your interoperability matrix to validate that everything is compatible.
Have you upgrade your vDS to 6.0?
My thoughts was to create a new vSwitch on an available vmnic on each host and move my VM's to the new vSwitch via the Esxi host gui. Ultimately, we would like to get off the DVS switch. But what about the hosts?
Yes, you can create a new vSwitch and perform the tasks. However, I dont understand your query "what about the hosts" ? If you are thinking how to add the hosts to new vCenter 6.0. That is easy, after moving all your vms to standard switch. You can go to new vCenter server and add the hosts. Let me know if your query is different.
