Month: July 2016

Upgrade of vCenter 5.5 to vCenter 6.0 with External PSC

Pradeep AdapaLeave a comment

I was pretty surprised to see that there are very few posts on the internet detailing the process of upgrading vCenter 5.5 to vCenter 6.0 with an External PSC. so here is my recent experience on how I did it

Environment:

vCenter server 5.5 (Windows)

vCenter SSO 5.5 (Windows)

SQL Server 2012 (Windows)

  1. Take snapshots of the vCenter server, vCenter SSO server and SQL server
  2. take a backup of the vCenter database in the SQL server
  3. mount the “VMware-VIMSetup-all-6.0.0-2562643.iso” to the Windows vCenter SSO 5.5 server
  4. Go ahead and run the autorun program and run the vCenter setup program
  5. The program will automatically detect the SSO 5.5 in the server and let you know that it will be upgraded to PSC 6.0
  6. Click next to continue to go ahead and upgrade the SSO 5.5 to PSC 6.0

This will complete the upgrade process of SSO 5.5 to PSC 6.0

Once this process is complete, we can go ahead and upgrade the vCenter 5.5 to vCenter 6.0 as the SSO 5.5 is upgraded to PSC 6.0

This concludes the way in which we can upgrade the vCenter 5.5 to 6.0 using external PSC if there is already an SSO 5.5 server available in the environment.

Upgrade or Patch An External PSC (Platform Services Controller) vCenter 6.0

Pradeep Adapa6 Comments

Today, I had to patch an external PSC controllers at a customer site, and here is the process I followed:

  1. First, take a snapshot of the platform controllers (PSC01 and PSC02)
  2. Enable SSH on the platform controllers (SSH), I did this by logging in from the DCUI of the PSC appliance and enable SSH
  3. Use a client like Putty to SSH into PSC01
  4. Before doing anything, go ahead and mount the iso, in my case it was “VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-6.0.0.xxxxx-36xxxxx-patch.iso” to the PSC01 virtual machine
  5. After logging into the PSC01 using SSH, login to PSC01 and perform the following commands
  6. Command> software-packages stage --iso --acceptEulas
  7. The above command will stage the code in the appliance
  8. Once the staging is complete, we do the following
  9. Command>software-packages install --staged
  10. This will start the installation of the staged code in the PSC
  11. we repeat the same steps for PSC01

here is the screen of the commands:

Patching_External_PSC_controller

PS: I have observed that the installation process takes quite a while to complete.

Here is the error I have come across when upgrading the PSC:

Error_while_upgrading_PSC

NOTE: I have received an error “specified group ‘Ip’ unknown” while upgrading the PSC and the solution is to enable IPv6 on the PSC before starting the upgrade. This solution was taken from the release notes here

EDIT: I have observed that even if you enable IPv6 on the appliance, you still get the message “Specified group ‘Ip’ unknown”, however the upgrade process fine and completes the upgrade.

 

EDIT: You could also use the following command if you don’t want to stage the code

Command>software-packages install --iso --acceptEulas