upgrade

This is a short revisit of an earlier blog post on automating ESXi installation through PXE booting and Kickstart scripts

This week I’ve been playing in our vCenter lab and tested the upgrade to 6.7 U1 and also changing the deployment type to vCenter with embedded PSC. I must say that the vCenter team has done a great job on the upgrade process over the last year. Both our migration from the Windows vCenter to the VCSA as well as the upgrade of a VCSA works well and there are lots of great documentation.

When trying to upgrade our lab vcenter from 6.5 to 6.7 this week we encountered a strange error. Our lab environement is running vSphere 6.5 on VCSA and we are running with an external PSC. So when starting the upgrade of the PSC I got an error early in the process, while connecting to the source VCSA. Error when deploying appliance I had remembered that I’ve seen some strange errors before if the root password of the appliance was expired.

After the release of the new and shiny version 4.1 of HPE OneView we have tried to upgrade one of our (smaller) OneView instances. The update process is usually quite straight forward and it gets better in every release. The upgrade to 4.0 from 3.x had some issues with certificate handling post-upgrade, but it was manageable. The upgrade from 4.0 to 4.1 should not be affected by the same so I had great hopes about a smooth upgrade.

In my last post about upgrading vCenter to 6.5 I’ve outlined the steps I needed to do for the migration. Both pre-migration, the actual migration and some post-migration steps. Today we were about to upgrade/migrate one of our oldest and biggest vCenters which presented some additional steps to consider for the pre-migration checks and tasks. This is also described in the VMware documentation so it shouldn’t be a surprise to those reading that before migrating.

In a previous postI talked about the upgrade of our vSphere environment. The first post described the upgrade and migration of the Platform Services Controller (PSC) from a version 6 running on Windows to a 6.5 Appliance. Our upgrade path would be PSC -> vCenter -> Hosts. Our environment consists of several vCenters so this will take some time and we might upgrade hosts in a vCenter that has been upgraded to 6.

This month we started our upgrade journey from vSphere 6.0 -> 6.5 in production. We have had 6.5 running in lab for some time after the release last fall and we have enjoyed it so far. As a part of this upgrade we plan to migrate to the vCenter appliance on both PSC’s and vCenter’s as this has gotten all functionality (i.e. Update Manager), and it scales to the same extent as the Windows one.