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SteveR123
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

vSphere 6 - upgrade or fresh install?

Hi, I have spent some time testing our vSphere6 upgrade approach. We have 2 sites, linked mode vCenters, integrated SSO.

The recommended approach is to move to an external PSC on both sites for this setup. In a test environment, I have tried adding an external SSO first,upgrading this to an external PSC, pointing the existing vCenter to it then upgrading vCenter.

I'm not having any success with the vCenter part of this, and I wouldn't be 100% confident in such an infrastructure.

So the question is what are the pro's and con's of starting with a fresh vCenter 6 install and moving our ESXi hosts and VM's into it as opposed to the upgrade approach? I understand we will lose historical performance data for a start.

As always thanks in advance for your thoughts and experiences folks.

Steve

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SavkoorSuhas
Expert
Expert

Hello Steve,

The cons are as you mentioned performance history is lost

Task and events are lost

If you have cluster configured with HA and DRS they have to be created and configured again

If the same DB is not being used and if you are using vDS in your environment, then it would be best to migrate to standard switch and then perform the fresh install. Then migrate the ESXi host to the newly installed vCenter and then migrate back to vDS.

If there is no vDS then the first 3 points are pretty much it.

VMware KB: Moving a managed ESXi/ESX host from one vCenter Server to another vCenter Server

Suhas

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