How to Upgrade vCenter Server Appliance from 6.5 to 6.7 – Stage 2

In a previous article (How to Upgrade vCenter Server Appliance from 6.5 to 6.7 – Stage 1) I walked through the first phase of the upgrade process for vCSA 6.7 (embedded deployment) – Deploy the OVA File of the new vCenter Server Appliance with an embedded Platform Services Controller. In this article I will cover phase 2 of the vCenter upgrade – transfer the data and setup the newly deployed vCenter Server Appliance.

Upgrade vCenter Server Appliance from 6.5 to 6.7 – Stage 2

In the last step of the phase 1, I was presented with the following screen:

To start phase 2, I clicked on “Continue” button from the upper image, just to stare at a blanc screen:

This may have something to do with the computer I ran the wizard from, but the simplest workaround was to just start a Chrome session and point it to the URL presented in the first image. I was presented with same familiar interface. As we upgrade a vCSA deployment, click on “Upgrade”.

We then have to enter root credentials for vCSA and click “Log In”.

There’s a short introduction, all we need to do is click “Next”.

We need to enter now credentials to connect to the source vCenter Server instance and to the ESXi host that manages the source vCSA. Click “Next” when complete.

The wizard will now save the parameters and will run  pre-upgrade checks. Make sure you read and understand the warnings you may receive before moving on. In my case, I had few warnings about disabling fully automated DRS and certain configuration files which will not be copied over. Click “Close”.

We then need to select which data will be transferred to the new instance. I left the default (Configuration, no historical data). Click “Next”.

Now we need to decide if we enroll into CEIP – VMware Customer Experience Improvement Program. If you don’t know how this can help, Duncan Epping has a nice demo of what vSAN support team can do when CEIP is enabled (How to simplify vSAN support!). Click “Next”.

We can now check all the choices we made. We need to confirm we have a backup of the source systems and we can click on “Finish”.

Are we sure? Yes we do 🙂 Click “OK”.

Data transfer will start immediately. We are now at the first step (Copy data from source vCenter Server to target vCenter Server). Wizard will pass through different stages (preparing source system for exporting data, exporting data for different services, shutting down source machine, applying network configuration). After this step the original vCSA 6.5 is powered off.

First step is completed, moving to the second step now – Set up target vCenter Server and start services. This starts one by one all vCenter services – you may watch the progress as displayed in the wizard.

Finally, the third and last step imports copied data to the target vCenter. Wizard will stop few services, then will import data, and will execute post-upgrade actions.

Read and understand the messages displayed. When done, click “Close”.

Upgrade is complete now. You can find a link to vCSA Getting Started page. Click on it.

We can see the appliance start page now, with the well-known links to the two vSphere Clients.

And here is the HTML5 web client of vSphere 6.7!

Enjoy the upgrade to vCenter Server 6.7 🙂