Hello,
I've been trying to find out if this is a good option or not. I currently have a client that has two vCenter 5.5 servers with embedded SSO modules, they both belong to the same SSO domain, but different sites. They are in geographically different locations. I've discovered that a direct upgrade isn't a good idea because that would put me in an unsupported configuration at 6.0 or 6.5.
So I'm trying to figure out the best way to go about an upgrade. My thought was to create two new external PSC appliances in the same new SSO domain, one in each physical location, with a dedicated VCSA for each of the PSC appliances. Each VCSA will manage the corresponding local vSphere cluster. I would simply disconnect and reconnect the hosts to migrate them from the old 5.5 vCenter servers to the new ones, and then upgrade them to 6.5. I've used that process in the past successfully, and there is nothing elaborate about the clusters to force me to keep the current vCenter servers that I can think of.
The documentation that I've found doesn't really show this type of config though, at least not between two sites. It does show this all in one site, mentioning a manual failover in the event of a PSC failure. It also shows having two PSC appliances in each site with a load balancer in between each pair and two vCenter appliances in each site, all for redundancy and automatic fail-over. Though these two sites are geographically separate, they are pretty small, hence the current embedded SSO configuration so implementing load balancers seems like overkill.
We want to end up with enhanced linked mode enabled and working between the two vCenter appliances, just not sure about the best way to get there.
Any thoughts or ideas, or pointers to existing docs that I haven't seen would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Keith
