Rollback to 5.5 from 6.5

[jprovine7]

I believe that in any good upgrade there have to be a solid rollback to the prior version. So having said that is it possible to rollback from  the 6.5 appliance upgrade back to the microsoft windows 2008 hardware server version 5.5?

[sjesse]

When you use the migration too it just shuts the windows vcenter down and leaves if off. If you need it again you can shut the appliance off and restart it. For each host you upgrade you can roll back if needed

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1033604

In the worst case scenerio you should always have your windows vcenter, you would just need to reinstall 5.5 on each host if the failback doesn't work. .

[jprovine7]

Does the article(good article) you included only apply to the Esxi hosts and not the vcenter server?

[sjesse]

vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 Migration Walkthrough - VMware vSphere Blog

[rajen450m]

Hi jprovine7​

As i have told you before in other discussion, during the upgrade process with migration-assistant tool.

It will copy the data from existing vcenter 5.5 to 6.5 and makes this shutdown and powers on target.

If by any chance you want to re-use the old one (power-off the target)., just poweron source (5.5 vcenter) and start using it..

You can use this below article for step-by-step upgrade process:

How to Upgrade VMware vCenter Appliance (VCSA) 5.5 to 6.5.0 u1e

[jprovine7]

Yes very good articles but in the migration process when it turns the old one on and brings up the new one, does the new one have the IP address and name of the old one?  Is that why you can turn the new one off and the old one on and it will take over? I do not remember that being covered in the articles.

[rajen450m]

Yes the new one will have the DNS name and IP address settings of your old server.

It will be shown in "Review the settings before submitting the wizard to start the next stage" option in the article.

We have to give a temporary IP to get the new vcenter to copy the data from the old one.

Once the data is copied, source will be automatically shutdown and target new vcenter will update the changes to it...

[jprovine7]

What you are describing sounds like a very simple and easy to do rollback, turn one off and turn one on . So if you had to rollback, once you have found out why it failed, do you start the upgrade process from scratch again or try to reuse the new appliance that failed?

[rajen450m]

yes

You have to start from the scratch....

[jprovine7]

Thanks you have been a big help