Unable to boot from vCenter Appliance 6.5 iso

[DefenderAtkins]

Hi all,

I have 3 ESXi 5.5 hosts controlled by vCenter 5.5 server.

I want to setup a vCenter Appliance 6.5 VM and move the hosts onto it one by one and upgrade them. That was the plan.

But when I try to create VM from the ISO, the VM will not just boot from it.

I have tried:

Downloading the iso twice.

Downloading different versions 6.5, 6.7

Booting from other OS iso; the VM boots from every other iso

Creating VM version 8 and 10

Creating VM via fat client and web client

No matter what I do, the VM will not simply boot from the vCenter 6.5 iso attached to it.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

The vCenter Server ISO images are not bootable. What you want to do is to mount them to your OS, and run the installer from there.

Btw. instead of installing the new appliance, you can select to upgrade/migrate (depending on whether you come from a vCSA, or a Windows based vCenter Server), which will basically create a new VM, but migrate the existing configuration to the new appliance. Note that there's no upgrade path available from v5.5 to v6.7, and I'd suggest you go with vCenter 6.5 Update 1 (Update 2 is currently not yet supported by several 3rd party backup applications).

André

[DefenderAtkins]

Yes that's right. I just realised how it was supposed to be installed correctly.

I just want to tell my experience and hopefully this could benefit someone in the future.

I have a vCenter 5.5 server which I want to shutdown permanently. It was carried over from an old domain so it is being used as standalone vCenter server in this new domain.

During the process of deploying the new vCenter 6.5 Appliance to the current vCenter 5.5 server, I had to create a new SSO on the new vCenter 6.5 Appliance. I used the default vsphere.local as the domain.

When I click finished, and the Appliance moves on to configure, it fails with this error message:

After this, the only option available is to start deploying the Appliance from scratch again.

Upon reading through VMWare KBs, I was convinced that it was the case of DNS record missing in the DNS server so I went in there and created it manually.

However, this did not resolve the issue. Eventually, I found out that the current vCenter also has an SSO domain called vsphere.local. So when deploy the new Appliance with default SSO domain vsphere.local, it was conflicting with the current one.

So when I tried to re-deploy the vCenter 6.5 Appliance on the third attempt, I used a different name for the SSO like "xxx"vsphere.local and it worked.

I hope this helps someone in the future.