Upgrade scenario of a Vcenter 5.5 to Vcenter 6.0

[Will_vlt]

Hi !

I have set up a scenario to upgrade our vcenter 5.5 to vcenter 6.0. As I have never done that before I would like to have a confirmation that this is the correct way to proceed or somebody to correct my mistakes.

A bit of information before we start :

-> We have a cluster of 5 hypervisors running ESXi 5.5.0. On those, we have 39 VM's, and we know by experience that we can get all those VM's open running with only 4 hypervisors in case of problem. All the storage is on a SAN.

So the plan is to :

- First, from the ISO of VCSA 6.0, launch the installer and select upgrade.

- This should trigger the install of a new  vcenter 6.0 VM

- This new VM should retrieve all the data it needs from the old vcenter 5.5 VM

To do so I know I need at least 100Go free for this new vcenter 6.0 VM

Once this is working well the next step is to upgrade all the hypervisors to ESXi 6.0, isn't it?

- To perform the upgrade I need to migrate all the running VM's from the ESX server I want to upgrade.

- Afterward I think the easiest way is to do the upgrade using the VMWare repository with esxcli (and choose update and not install).

- Then I will repeat the same thing for each ESX server which should allow me to keep my VM's open running most of the time.

I am more concerned about the last step, should I update the VM version of every single virtual machine or will they be compatible straight away?

Please feel you free to correct me if I am wrong and bring your experience on !

Thank you very much

William

[ASavener2 · Accepted solution]

Yes, you have the right order of operations, assuming you only have vCenter and ESXi.  If you use other VMware/vRealize products, please see:

Update sequence for vSphere 6.0 and its compatible VMware products (2109760)

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=21097...

Once vCenter and ESXi have been upgraded, then you can address whether to upgrade VMware Tools and the guest VM hardware version.

I suggest trialing both of these, before making the change to all of your guests.

[BruceBannermanz]

Look into VCenter Migration Tool

vCenter Server Migration Tool: vSphere 6.0 Update 2m - VMware vSphere Blog