When the OVA deployment finishes, you are redirected to stage 2 of the upgrade process to transfer the data from the old appliance and start the services of the newly deployed vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 with an embedded Platform Services Controller.

Procedure

  1. Review the introduction to stage 2 of the upgrade process and click Next.
  2. Wait for the pre-upgrade check to finish and read the pre-upgrade check result if any.
    • If the pre-upgrade check result contains error messages, read the messages and click Logs to export and download a support bundle for troubleshooting.

      You cannot proceed with the upgrade until you have corrected the errors.

      Important: If you have provided incorrect vCenter Single Sign-On user name and password of the source appliance during stage 1, the pre-upgrade check fails with an authentication error.
    • If the pre-upgrade check result contains warning messages, read the messages and click Close.

      After you have verified that your system meets the requirements from the warning message, you can proceed with the upgrade.

  3. If you are upgrading version 5.5 of the vCenter Server Appliance that uses the embedded vCenter Single Sign-On instance, on the Site name configuration page, enter the site name for the vCenter Single Sign-On, and click Next.
    The site name must contain alphanumeric characters. Choose your own name for the vCenter Single Sign-On site. You cannot change the name after installation.

    Non-ASCII or high-ASCII characters are not supported in site names. Your site name must include alphanumeric characters and a comma (,), period (.), question mark (?), dash (-), underscore (_), plus sign (+) or equals sign (=).

  4. On the Select upgrade data page, choose the types of data that you want to transfer from the old appliance to the new upgraded appliance.
    The large amount of data requires more time to be transferred to the new appliance. For minimum upgrade time and storage requirement for the new appliance, select to transfer only the configuration data.
  5. Review the VMware Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) page and choose if you want to join the program.
    For information about the CEIP, see the Configuring Customer Experience Improvement Program section in vCenter Server and Host Management.
  6. On the ready to complete page, review the upgrade settings, accept the backup acknowledgment, and click Finish.
  7. Read the shutdown warning message and click OK.
  8. Wait for the data transfer and setup process to finish and click OK to go to the vCenter Server Getting Started page.

Results

The vCenter Server Appliance is upgraded. The old vCenter Server Appliance is powered off and the new appliance starts.

What to do next

  • Verify Your vCenter Server Appliance Upgrade or Migration Is Successful.

  • If the old vCenter Server Appliance uses a non-ephemeral distributed virtual port group, to preserve the port group setting, you can manually connect the new appliance to the original non-ephemeral distributed virtual port group. For information about configuring virtual machine networking on a vSphere distributed switch, see vSphere Networking.

  • You can configure high availability for the vCenter Server Appliance. For information about providing vCenter Server Appliance high availability, see vSphere Availability.