OK understood - since the upgrade process technically involves deploying new vcenter appliances anyway, I guess when you say 'deploy new vcenter server', this means there is currently no automated process to transfer SSO and vcenter DB data into a different topology? - so, basically, the upgrade wizards can only upgrade like-for-like appliances?

Is there a time frame for building this external-to-embedded migration feature?  Moving to a new vcenter would be a hard pill to swallow for us - multiple customers / sub companies sharing a centralised linked mode vcenter model, distributed switches everywhere, multiple VSAN instance etc....oof.

If the embedded model offers feature parity, I think I'd be inclined to wait for vsphere release that provided a migration path to this simplified deployment architecture.  Depends how long we can hang on.

Thanks for your advice!