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 7.0.

Prerequisites

Understand the data migration options available to you when upgrading or migrating to a vCenter Server appliance with an embedded PostgreSQL database. See Transferring Data After Upgrade or Migration.

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. Connect to the source appliance that you want to upgrade.
    1. Enter the information about the source vCenter Server appliance that you want to upgrade, and click Connect to Source.
      Option Action
      Appliance FQDN or IP address Enter the IP address or FQDN of the vCenter Server appliance that you want to upgrade.
      Appliance HTTPS port

      If the source appliance uses a custom HTTPS port, change the default value to that of the custom port. The default port value is 443.

      Custom port values are supported beginning with vCenter Server appliance version 6.5 Update 2. If you are upgrading from earlier versions, you cannot specify a custom port.

    2. Enter the information about the vCenter Single Sign-On administrator and root user.
      Option Action
      SSO user name

      Enter the vCenter Single Sign-On administrator user name.

      Important: The user must be administrator@ your_domain_name.
      SSO password Enter the password of the vCenter Single Sign-On administrator.
      Appliance (OS) root password Enter the password of the root user.
    3. Enter the information about the source ESXi host or vCenter Server instance on which resides the vCenter Server appliance that you want to upgrade and click Next.
      Option Description
      Source server or host name IP address or FQDN of the source ESXi host or vCenter Server instance on which the vCenter Server appliance that you want to upgrade resides.
      Note: The source vCenter Server instance cannot be the vCenter Server appliance that you want to upgrade. In such cases, use the source ESXi host.
      HTTPS port

      If the ESXi host or vCenter Server instance uses a custom HTTPS port, change the default value.

      The default value is 443.

      User name User name of a user with administrative privileges on the ESXi host or vCenter Server instance.
      Password Password of the user with administrative privileges on the ESXi host or vCenter Server instance.
  4. On the Select migration data page, choose the types of data that you want to transfer from the old appliance to the new, upgraded appliance.
    A large amount of data requires more time to be transferred to the new appliance. For the minimum upgrade time and storage requirements for the new appliance, select to transfer only the configuration data. If you are using an external Oracle database, you can also choose to migrate historical and performance metrics data in the background after you deploy and start the new vCenter Server appliance.
  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 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.