It's Time to Shore Up the VMWare Environment

[baazil1]

Looking for a direction to take as it seems there are many... our current VMWare environment is as follows:

Dell VRTX with two Blade Servers acting as Host 1 and Host 2. Each host is running WMWare ESXi, 6.0.0, 2809209 (this is a VMWare vSphere 6 Essentials free license)

vCenter Server Appliance build 3634794, which I believe makes it VMware vCenter Server 6.0 Update 2.

We haven't been very good about keeping the Hosts updated. I went to look into that and noticed that there isn't even an instance of Update Manager on the VCSA.

I'd like to get vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 up and running, but the upgrade from 6.0 U2 failed miserably. I'm thinking I may just need to create a new 6.5 VCSA and add the hosts. There's no real configuration settings in the current vCenter... I'm assuming I just add the new VCSA 6.5 and then delete the old VCSA 6.0?

After that I can add update manager and look into patching the hosts.

I don't want to upgrade the entire ESXi just yet as I'm looking into a full license and an extra Blade Server in the next couple of months.

Thoughts on which direction I should go? Is there any issues with ESXi 6.0 and VCSA 6.5?

[a_p_]

... but the upgrade from 6.0 U2 failed miserably

Would you like to share what happened, and what the current state is? I.e. is the "old" VCSA still working? Maybe there's an easy solution for this.

You can certainly deploy a new VCSA instance, but it's usually easier to upgrade an existing instance.

VCSA 6.5 can manage ESXi Hosts 5.5 and later, so there should be no issues with a delayed host upgrade.

As a side note: Essentials is not a free license. It's a paid edition which comes with licenses for 1 instance of vCenter Server for Essentials, and 6 CPU licenses for 3 hosts with up to 2 CPUs each. So that's already a "full" license, and there's no need to purchase another one unless you want/need additional features.

André

[tkutil]

Unrelated to your question. How do you like the VRTX? I'm looking for a low cost solution for a small environment. Would you recommend the VRTX?

Thanks

Troy

[sjesse]

I'm assuming I just add the new VCSA 6.5 and then delete the old VCSA 6.0?

That is how we went from 5.5 to 6.5, you just need to readd permissions, folders, alarms, and any other customizations you did before. If you have a distributed switch you may need to revert to standard first, I tried that with on enviornment first, and there was a mismatch that caused problems.