Time had come to upgrade my lab environment to vSphere 6.5, the following will illustrate the upgrade process for the Platform Service Controller (PSC) followed by the vCenter. Its important components are upgraded in the correct order, the PSC is the first component to be upgraded. To see the upgrade sequence see here. Also check out the pre-reqs for the upgrade, see VMware documentation here.

In my lab I have the PSC configured in external mode meaning my vCenter appliances are separate VMs, this post will cover the PSC upgrade followed by the vCenter.

First step is to download the media, im running in a virtual appliance so I download the media for that, The iso needs to be mounted from a deployment machine, open the iso and go to the following.

>\vcsa-ui-installer\win32\installer.exe

I choose Upgrade

Go through the introduction and accept the license agreement.

I now need to point to the source PSC that will be upgraded and its host / vCentre that manages it. Add SSO admin credentials, PSC appliance root password and host / vCenter credentials.

Now I need to enter the details for the new appliance. The process is not a direct upgrade but rather a deployment of a full new appliance and the data is migrated automatically. I will end up with two VMs after the process, the old and new appliances. That means the new appliance needs a unique object name, bear this in mind if you have strict naming conventions. I point to my management host but this can be vCenter.

Add an appliance name and root password, note this has to be different from the source appliance.

I choose my storage options for the new appliance.

Now I enter a temporary IP address for the new appliance, this will only be used during the migration and will revert back to the original PSC IP once complete.

Review and complete.

All being well the deployment should complete.

The wizard will then move onto stage 2 which involves migrating the data.

Run through the wizard and complete. Before you can complete you must confirm there has been a backup of the source PSC.

The source PSC will be powered down and the network on the new PSC will be enabled.

Now let the wizard complete.

Once complete open the console and notice it is a new version.

In my environment my Web Client didnt automatically work with the changes, it would load up fine but wouldnt log in. After reboot of my vCenter appliance I could log in fine.

Now I need to upgrade my vCenter. Check the order in for upgrade in your environment you may need to upgrade other components before vCenter, for instance I upgraded my NSX Manager before vCenter. I run the same setup as above for the PSC and Upgrade.

Go through the introduction and accept the license agreement.

I now need to add the source vCenter information, the vCenter details and the host where the VM resides. If you select vCenter here you will get a failure trying to migrate the data.

Initially this failed as my root password on the appliance had expired, I had to update this first.

I then got another error relating to Update Manager, in 6.5 Update Manager is installed on the virtual appliance and the setup will migrate the existing VUM data to this. My VUM server for 6.0 is running on a Windows server so I need to prepare this for the migration.

>Unable to retrieve the migration assistant extension on source vCenter Server. Make sure migration assistant is running on the VUM Server.

I had to run a script on the VUM server, the script is on the media. Copy the mgration-assistant folder to the VUM server and run VMware-MigrationAssistant

Enter the credentials for the account used for VUM. In my case I am using a domain service account. That will prepare the VUM server ready for the vCenter migration, once complete I simply go back to the wizard and continue.

Now I need to point to the target host for the new appliance, very similar to the PSC deployment.

Add a new name for the appliance, must be unique.

Choose the required deployment type. Note - make sure there is enough RAM on the host to power up the appliance. In my lab I didnt as I was running the live vCenter as well, I need to add more RAM just to complete the migration.

I now need to pick a datastore.

Review and finish.

Let the deployment complete.

The second phase of the migration will now start.

Initially I had some of the deployment settings wrong but luckily at this stage I didnt have redploy. If you need to change some of the details at this stage go to the following.

>https://Temp_IP_Address:5480

I add the correct details.

It will now do some pre migration checks and report any errors that would prevent a successful migration.

I choose how much data I want to migrate.

Review and complete.

Let the migration complete, it take a little while in my environment.

I get a nice information status now telling my to update my Auto Deploy settings.

I did have to reboot the new appliance to pick up my NSX plug in but other than that all was migrated well. My certificates also look to have migrated fine.

To be sure I renewed a host certificate against my upgraded VMCA and it renewed successfully. Note the date (Mar 1st 2017) the date of this publish.

Now I need to upgrade my hosts using the new integrated Update Manager.