vSphere Upgrade 5.0 to 6.0 - Part 2
This post takes up where we left off and we're ready to install a pair of Platform Service Controllers, we could do this anytime of course as 5.0 has no clue that SSO exists so we'll just spin these up and do the install ready for the vCenter upgrade itself.
Now is a good time to start using snapshots as I'm trying to figure out how to install the PSCs to get Enhanced Linked Mode working but use separate sites. They say in the KBs this is for load balancers which I'm not after so I'm wondering how this works out. My two installs were configured as follows:
This is the first PSC:
This is the second PSC:
Now, you only get to name a site in the first PSC yet one architecture mentioned is as follows:
This is a bit annoying, I want the picture above, but how do I get it...?! Ahaa....when you run the install on the second one and click next, and move onto the NEXT SCREEN, you get this:
Now, we're talkin'! I've now got two defined Sites but a single SSO Domain for Enhanced Link Mode - brilliant! They are using self signed cert but we'll get that....!
So, now we're ready to proceed. I've found KBs on moving vCenter to a new Server, relocating the vCenter Database and the usual upgrade approaches but I've not come across anything that combines all of these while preserving settings, changing OS and dealing with security settings. So the question really is is it possible - yes, but how to do it reliably in the least number of steps.
Note: I was using Remote Desktop Connection Manager 2.2 on windows 10 and after opening more than 5 or 6 connections my desktop would hang. I've upgrade to version 2.7 but lost all my configuration, so back yours up if you're facing a similar scenario! Mine works fine now....I am also getting huge peaks due to .NET security updates doing a optimization sweep after their reboot, so it's a matter of waiting patiently until that settles down.....I only gave my VMs a single vCPU so that's not helping! I'll have to save up for that second physical CPU!!
Now, back to those KBs:
Moving the VMware vCenter Server 4.x/5.x/6.0.x SQL database (7960893)
Updating rollup jobs after the error: Performance data is currently not available for this entity (1004382)
Migrating vCenter Server to a different host machine (5850444)
(Note: This is for vCenter versions up to 5.5, it doesn't mention 6.0!!)
Manually backing up and restoring the VMware vCenter Server 4.x and 5.x ADAM instance data (1029864)
The first two deal with SQL, the third and fourth deal with vCenter and the linked mode ADAM database (although this is not used in vCenter 6.0). One advantage is we're using vCenter 5.0 which has no SSO to worry about, we've deployed clean and prestine PSC's so the next step really is to deal with vCenter itself. We need do to the following:
- Upgrade from 5.0 to 6.0
- Point upgrade at external PSC
- Preserve all existing settings and Hosts, VMs etc
- Replatform to Server 2012R2 - new host so new certificates will be required....!
- Switch Database to new SQL Server - new DSN required here and recreate rollup jobs
- Upgrade any components such as distributed vswitches, etc to 6.0 mode
There are some restrictions due to compatibility. For instance we know vCenter 5.0 doesn't support SQL 2014 so we can't do that bit until AFTER we upgrade to vCenter 6.0.
One scenario I wondered about was if we move the database anyway and installed vCenter 6.0 would pointing it at that moved vCenter 5.0 Database trigger an upgrade? What else would we have to pre-copy over to do the install on the 2012R2 vm rather than install on 2008R2 on top of vCenter 5.0 and THEN move it?!
So, to prep, we install the SQL Native Client from SQL 2012 SP3 Feature Pack, as the "Microsoft ODBC Driver 11 for SQL Server - Windows" doesn't work with VMware!!!:
This goes on both new vCenter Servers running Server 2012 R2.
The last thing I will do with the old environment is to load up vCenter and check everything is working ok. In my case I'd forgotten to power up the Storevirtual lab so all my VMs appeared disconnected!! Dooh. I just want to make sure I'm coming from a stable environment before shutting things down and performing partial upgrades.
So, I've created an Update Manager baseline, added a 5.0.0 distributed vSwitch attached to a spare virtual nic on my nested esxi hosts and checked SRM is ok and now we're good to go!
So, to begin with I'll stop all the VMware services on the legacy vCenter and SRM VMs. then move the vCenter and Update Manager databases to SQL 2014. Stay tuned for my next post and I'll let you know how I got on!
