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wkucardinal
Contributor
Contributor

Tricky upgrade question with vCenter virtualized

This seems like a tricky proposition but maybe I am overthinking it.

We have a 4.1 cluster with 4 virtual hosts.  We have a new 5.5 cluster with 7 new hosts.  The new environment is completely built and we have been upgrading virtual machines from our 4.1 environment by moving them in to the 5.5 environment and using update manager to perform orchestrated virtual machine/vmtools upgrades.  Everything is working quite nicely.

Our vCenter 5.5 VM up until this point has been running as a virtual machine on our 4.1 cluster.  We did this because we wanted to virtualize it but wanted to put it in (At the time) a running production environment, which was our 4.1 environment.

My question is, when it is time to upgrade the vCenter 5.5 VM, I need to migrate it over to my ESXi 5.5 cluster.  Then, if I follow the same procedure I have been following, I will initiate an orchestrated upgrade from the vSphere client/web interface on the virtual machine.  At this point, the VM is going to be intermittently unavailable while it upgrades, so I won't be able to use vCenter.  That is assuming this method would even work, because update manager runs from vCenter and vCenter won't be up.  And what if it fails?  What the heck do I do then? Smiley Happy

So, what method do I need to follow to do this?

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership

I'd suggest you migrate the vCenter Server VM over to the new cluster, then upgrade VMware Tools manually, and as a last step consider upgrading the virtual machine hardware. For the last step - if you are going to do this - I'd recommend you select the vSphere 5.1 compatibility (HW version 9) instead of 5.5/10. This will allow you to still manage the vCenter Server VM from the Windows based vSphere Client if required.

André

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Mahie
Contributor
Contributor

Is your question been answered !

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