Upgrade Lab to vCenter 6.5

Upgrade Lab to vCenter 6.5

This post will cover upgrading my Lab to vSphere 6.5. After due consideration of the push by VMware to move to the vCenter Appliance I decided that rather than a protracted Server OS change to 2016 and the fact vCenter 6.5 doesn't support SQL 2016 it would be far easier to test the migration wizard and move to VCSA 6.5. It's only my Lab after all!!

Mount the VCSA ISO and copy the "migration-assistant" folder to your vCenter VM. Run the "VMware-Migration-Assistant.exe" file and you should see the following if it doesn't encounter any errors in your environment:

Sorry about the large size but this contains a lot of important information. Next, run the <virtual cdrom letter>:\vcsa-ui-installer\win32\installer.exe file and choose Migrate in my case:

Click Next: 

 Accept the License Agreement:

 Provide the FQDN of your vCenter where you are running the migration wizard from. Ensure the port is open if using a Windows Firewall. Provide appropriate credentials:

 Accept the Thumbprint:

 Provide destination details of the ESXi Host or vCenter where you want to deploy the new VCSA appliance to. Nice to know if you're building out a new environment you can point elsewhere. In my case I'm pointing it back to the same vCenter I'm upgrading, let's see if it copes with that?!!

 Usual ssl warning:

 Select a Folder:

 Select a Host:

 Give the new VCSA a name and password:

 Select a Size:

 Select a Datastore:

 Give the new VCSA an available IP for the transition period. This will be interesting to see how it gets on and at what point it powers down my old Windows vCenter:

 Check everything and Click Finish:

 Coffee time:

 The VM deploys in the background as shown here. This is coming from the mounted ISO from my PC:

 Here is the console of the new VCSA during the initial startup Phase:

Which should lead to this when it's completed:

 The console shows the following (no IP mentioned):

After Clicking Continue you see the following:

 It communicates with the migration assistant again and offers the following warnings:

 The migration assistant is updated showing it has packaged and send the necessary migration data over from the old vCenter server:

Next provide an Active directory account with appropriate permissions to join AD:

 Decide what information you wish to preserve / migrate over, I'm selecting EVERYTHING!:

 Usual experience program stuff:

 Tick the box to declare you don't care! Then Click Finish

You get one last chance:

Oh no - What have I done?!!!! 

Somewhere along the way I noticed it's given the temporary IP to the VCSA:

Now I've just to wait for the migration to complete. 

Once the copy was over my old vCenter was shut down. 

So how did we do:

 Oh Dear....

You can download the VCSA logs to have a squint. 

Some of the errors in the logs are as follows:

2016-12-21T13:08:50.484Z INFO firstbootInfrastructure [Failed] /usr/lib/vmware-vpx/firstboot/vpxd_firstboot.py is complete

2016-12-21T13:08:50.485Z WARNING firstbootInfrastructure Bug component info file does not exist

2016-12-21T13:08:50.485Z INFO firstbootInfrastructure Firstboot duration: 483 sec

2016-12-21T13:08:50.485Z INFO firstbootInfrastructure First boot is a failure

2016-12-21T13:08:50.486Z INFO firstbootInfrastructure Changing vMon default start profile to ALL

2016-12-21T13:08:50.486Z WARNING firstbootInfrastructure stopping status aggregation...

and

2016-12-21T13:06:04.788Z [main WARN  com.vmware.cis.cm.client.ComponentManagerClient] 

So, looks like it encountered an error and I need to see if I can rollback to the old appliance or not. So, I deleted the VCSA65 VM and powered on LABVC and logged in. First thing to check is if it's still Domain joined!
Well, everything appears to have come back up ok - can log into vCenter and all the services are up.

Domain membership is NOT ok though - error via RDP "The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed". You can join a workgroup, reboot, rejoin the domain and reboot to resolve.....or....open Powershell and type in "reset-computermachinepassword -server labdc.lab.local" - just replace the server name with the FQDN of YOUR domain controller & reboot.

I could get into the ViClient (C#) and Web Client interfaces again without issue.

I can't say that the experience fills me with confidence. Obviously having backups / snapshots will help rollback but it's a big jump and at this point in a Production environment I'd be logging a support call to check what was the cause of the error but you're completely at their mercy at that point. Would a Windows version upgrade work I wonder? I'm considering my options at this point....

I would imagine that a complex Production environment would be more difficult. Would just choosing the Configuration option only work? Make sure you remove the VCSA65 VM from vCenter to clean it up.

I decided to give it one last try. I cleaned up a lost of dead objects from the Host & Clusters view and a few dead Distributed vSwitches, then tried a Configuration only migration. Result:

Darn it!!! It worked?!!!

 The VCSA65 VM Console now on the right IP:

Now you get a choice of web consoles:

Seriously - "Partial Functionality"?!!!! I thought HTML 5 was fully finished and took over the previous crap web interface?!! The HTML 5 URL is slightly different ending in /ui/:
https://labvc.lab.local/ui/

and what about the good old C# Client: 

Crapola!! 

So, guess where Update Manager is?! It's only in the OLD web client.....yet again we've a two tier management solution for vCenter, well done VMware. Maybe we'll get a fully functional HTML 5 experience by version 8.0?!! 

At least the migration worked so I can get used to the VCSA and ditch the old Windows vCenter and SQL server.....just need to upgrade my Domain Controller to Server 2006 next...!!

VM Explorer - Part 2

VM Explorer - Part 2

I've decided to split this post in two to give the operational side a bit more focus. I got a license so now can do some testing to see how the product operates in more detail. 

One small bug I found is after setting it up you can't just create a schedule to backup all VMs. Even enabling the sceduler doesn't permit you to click on the Add button!! You have to create a single VM backup job and THEN you can click Add in the scheduler to create a "Multi VMs" job!! 

Here is the Add Task Element screen depicted in the documentation but you can't access it until you create a single vm backup schedule! 

Now I can create a Multi VM job. Select the Host, in this case my vCenter:

 Click Select VMs, you then need to Click Add All or just select those you want:

The next option appears to be more for replication or backing up to an ESXi Host:

 The usual VSS options:

 I didn't change anything here:

 You can power off VMs if you want:

 And you can verify the backup, I assume this just checks it boot ok and provides a screenshot:

One interface quirk to be aware of is on the left. The Task Schedule applies to the task shown on the left. If you Click Add as I did it adds the Multi VM backup to the same schedule task. You can choose copy task and create an independent schedule task to use for other backup jobs instead.

This construct makes it awkward to assign schedules to particular jobs but there are a few quirks about the interface like this but once you're aware you will be able to work through it and achieve the desired result. 

So, I'm going to create a Multi VM backup job with one VM, run it once and then move the VM to a different Host. I want to ensure the backup job will follow the VM, basic stuff but important when using DRS. So, I did an initial backup , then moved it and here is the second backup job:

So it found the VM after it was moved and I didn't refresh the hosts, good so far!
The 2003 VM is an 8GB disk, thin provisioned. It has about 4GB of data. This is the VMware Datastore footprint:

 This is the backup footprint afterwards:

So that's a full 8GB used on my backup server. Ok, I could store it on Server 2012 R2 and use DeDuplication and I turned off compression so let's try a few of those options. First I'll enable incremental backups:

Now, let's do another backup, we get an error, ouch:

So let's clean down the backup folder. And note to self - configure the backup jobs the way you want them in the first place!!! This approach worked and here we have a small file and each incremental creates a subfolder with changes in it:

Now, let's try compression. The options are not available:

I can compress but only if incremental is not selected!

Finally because of the way you select VMs, there is no option to automatically add new VMs. 

Task History is available to monitor jobs both current and historical:

Well, that's about all I'll have time to play with. The product supports Tape and replication so there is more to it than just backup. Check out the feature table and backup to cloud options as if the price point is attractive it might suit your needs. Just take time to get used to some of it's quirks and ensure you are comfortable in it's use. 

I definitely feel like improvements are needed but hopefully the suggestions forum and feedback the team receive will drive this to mature the product beyond there it's at. They are releasing new versions regularly so keep an eye out for future changes!