vSphere 6.0 Upgrade - vCenter

vSphere 6.0 is now fully available and ready to be rolled. Here I would sit tight and wait for 6.1 to be out. As long as you want to deploy 6.0 in your Test and Dev environment it is fair enough. History shows that all 0 versions (3.0, 4.0, 5.0) were little bumpy and all 1's (4.1, 5.1) were most stable apart from 3.5. But this is my personal view. 

Before we go ahead with the vCenter update we need to see the current vSphere situation and post upgrade what will happen as well as type of upgrade options we have in vSphere 6.0. Here I am talking about Simple Install upgrade and not the Custom install since I don't have a very large production environment.

This is the current scenario in vSphere 5.x where we have two options. Simple install where everything is deployed on the server as package including Inventory Service, Web Client and SSO facility. There is another option called Custom install where you can segregate the components as shown in the diagram below. This is a preferred method for very large scale deployments. I am not going to talk much about this as we have been deploying this for years now and have fairly a good understanding on vSphere 5.x.

vSphere 5.x deployment model

Now here comes vSphere 6.0 which is slightly different from previous one in terms of deployment as well as its service components.

Platform Service Controller (PSC) is a new component added in vSphere 6.0 consist of common infrastructure services such as SSO, Licensing and Certification authority services.

vSphere 6.0 deployment model

Below is something going to happen at the time of upgrade. All the Simple Install components will be embedded into two things, PSC and vCenter.

vSphere Upgrade process

We also need to see what are the different components of PSC and vCenter that will be installed post upgrade.

vSphere 6.0 components

Note (very important): There are certain major Database changes done in vSphere 6.0, please plan your upgrade very carefully as these can impact in decision making. below they are,

1. Make sure you have a Full version of SQL Database ready and setup as Express version is no more supported in vSphere 6.0. If you have bundled Express version running with the current vCenter then post migration vSphere 6.0 will migrate it to PostGreSQL DB.
2. If you have Full version of DB already connected to vCenter 5.x then make sure backup and restore is setup on new vCenter server. You can import the already running Express version to Full version to save the data.
3. Once you have installed the vCenter server with PostGreSQL database and you re-install the vCenter server for any reason, then all data will be lost!

Upgrade steps,

1.  When you goto Programs and Features, you will see certain components of vSphere 5.x as these components were installed individually as part of Simple Install. We will see at the end what happens post upgrade as all components are now bundled inside vCenter and PSC.

2. This is my current setup in vCenter. There are two hosts with vCenter 5.1.

3. Double click on the vSphere 6.0 installation executable file. Here there are not many options as we used to see in vSphere 5.x. Click on vCenter Server for Windows and select Install.

4. It will now extract the zip and binaries to begin the installation. Also it is collecting the information of existing vCenter setup.

5. It will detect the currently running vSphere components like SSO and vCenter. SSO will be merged into PSC. It is also informing that it will upgrade the vCenter with Embedded Install option.

6. Accept EULA and click Next.

7. Here comes the interesting part. vCenter server strictly needs 8GB of RAM to install or upgrade. This was not the case earlier in vSphere 5.x. However, this can be tweaked. I just wanted to show the error.

8. Input the current vCenter server Username and Password.

9. Now see the warning I mentioned earlier. This is because I am upgrading my Simple Install vCenter with SQL Express and SQL Express is not supported anymore. We have no other option other than to click OK. 

10. Select the deployment type, either create a new SSO domain or join to a already existing one. Since I have 5.1 environment it is giving information that existing domain 'System-Domain' will be migrated to the 'vsphere.local'.

11. Take a note of these port numbers and make sure they are available. Click Next.

12. Change the directories if you have to. The description says it all. Click Next.

13. Verify and confirm the information including the backup of vCenter backup checkbox. Finally click 'Upgrade'.

14. Depending on the size of your environment and database size the time to upgrade may vary. With only two hosts in my environment it took 1 hour for me. Very the information again and click Finish.

15. Launch Web-Client and login using the SSO credentials (vsphere.local one).

16. You will see the below first screen once you login.

17. Now if you go back to Programs and Features you will see all the individual components are gone and merged into vCenter Server with an embedded Platform Service Controller.