I will eventually investigate the appliance option but I am not the only one who has the say so on moving from physical to virtual - I am outnumbered. This will be the first upgrade I have ever done before and the system was built and maintained by a previous admin. So as well as figuring out how they configured it I am also trying to upgrade it. So far all my test upgrades have failed in some way, right not is is an SSL cert issue and yes I read and tried the KB article where you step through the almost the entire uninstall of the vcenter (test system) recreate a default SSL and then try to upgrade again and it still fails on the same thing. It looks like there is a significant platform change between 5.5 and 6.0 and you cannot just export the database from the old server and import it into a fresh install of 6.0. The only option,in my current situation, appears to try to upgrade to 6.0 on the vcenter 5 server I have now and hope it works. That would be the great thing about having a virtual appliance I could snapshot and roll back if it failed . So I guess I am trying to find away I can roll back to 5.5 if the 6.0 upgrade fails before going forward. Things will still basically work without the vcenter but if I can avoid all the pain breaking it would create I would like to try to find it.