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
Yes, you have the right order of operations, assuming you only have vCenter and ESXi. If you use other VMware/vRealize products, please see:
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.
Yes, you have the right order of operations, assuming you only have vCenter and ESXi. If you use other VMware/vRealize products, please see:
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.
Look into VCenter Migration Tool
vCenter Server Migration Tool: vSphere 6.0 Update 2m - VMware vSphere Blog