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robincm
Contributor
Contributor

vSphere 5.0 to 6.0 upgrade hints/gotchas/etc.

I'm planning (hoping) to upgrade from vSphere 5.0 Update 3 to vSphere 6.0 Update 1.

I seem to be a little behind the times with still running 5.0, and wondered if anyone else has done this upgrade and would like to share anything about their experience? I am currently reading the various official upgrade guides and KB articles, so I am looking for real world experience, things that "just worked" (hopefully all of it!), things that didn't work and what you did to fix them. Things to consider that might not be emphasised sufficiently in the docs.

I have a single vCenter server (Windows Server 2008 R2) with a SQL 2008 R2 database. I have two vSphere "Datacenters", the first has two clusters with 8 hosts each - each cluster has HA + DRS enabled, the second datacenter just has three unclustered hosts. The vCenter certificate was issued by my AD CA. I have some vDistributed Switches, storage DRS clusters, VUM, and that's about it. Storage is provided by an old EMC Clariion CX4-480 (via FC) and some new Tintri units (NFS).

So there's NO: View, Orchestrator, vShield, vCOps, SRM, etc. etc.

At the moment I'm planning to go for a separate/external Platform Services Controller, and changing the vDS uplinks for the VM networks to LACP (2.x 10Gb each) , likewise the 2 x 10Gb uplinks to the vDS that handles the vMotion and NFS traffic, and the two 1Gb uplinks into the vSwitch that handles the ESXi management traffic. Are there any other changes you'd recommend?

Thanks in advance! Smiley Happy

1 Reply
unsichtbare
Expert
Expert

If you are committed to the upgrade, then Windows vCenter is the way to go, as there is no simple upgrade path from Windows to the VCSA. I have, however, become quite fond of the VCSA as natively scalable to the maximums supported by vSPhere! In addition, I have always been an advocate of "embedded" installations of vCenter fro the following reasons:

  1. Less resource overhead when the DB/PSC are run on the same VM as vCenter
  2. VMware has made the scalability of VMs so huge that there is no viable performance argument in favor of separating vCenter Services
  3. "External" deployments of the PSC/Database do not promote "no single point of failure," but rather multiple single points of failure

I think you were fortunate to have remained on 5.0 (bypassing 5.1 entirely) for as long as you have. The only other thing I might suggest is adding your PSC/SSO Identity sources using AD LDAP instead of the Machine Account. AD LDAP works equally well for Windows vCenter and VCSA and seems to make the vCenter (PSC) less dependant on AD overall.

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