vCenter appliance upgrade 5.1 -> 5.5

[diggn]

Hi,

I experimented with the upgrade from vShere 5.1 -> 5.5 in our somewhat limited lab environment.

One question remaining after basic testing is: 

If I upgrade the appliance, will the new one take on the old ones identity? In lab I was happy to

use DHCP for IP allocation, and didn't bother w/ proper DNS names.

In prod we have a static IP and a DNS entry for the appliance. What will happen to those during

the upgrade?  In lab (w/ the aforementioned parameters) the new appliance had an IP of its own,

which is not desirable in prod.

Cheers

[rcporto · Accepted solution]

If I upgrade the appliance, will the new one take on the old ones identity?

Yes, take a look at the following note from KB2058441:

Note: The new appliance shuts down the old appliance and assumes the network identity (IP address, hostname, and network configuration) of the old appliance after the transfer has completed. This process can take some time and the virtual machines may appear unresponsive during the transfer. If the old appliance was configured to use dynamic addressing, the new appliance also uses dynamic addressing. When the import completes, the new vCenter Server Appliance starts.

[diggn]

Yeah, I guess I just needed confirmation, as this is not what I saw in lab.

Thanks Richardson