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. When the deployment finishes, vCenter Server has high availability protection.

Prerequisites

Understand the data migration options available to you when upgrading or migrating to a vCenter Server appliance with an embedded PostgreSQL database. You can select to migrate historical and other types of data in the background after deploying and starting vCenter Server. 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. Specify the replication topology for the vCenter Server. When converging vCenter Server instance with an external Platform Services Controller you must specify the replication topology.

    Convergence is the process of converting a vCenter Server instance with an external Platform Services Controller to a vCenter Server instance with those services embedded in the appliance.

    • This is the first vCenter Server in the topology that I want to converge.
    • This is a subsequent vCenter Server.

      If this is a subsequent vCenter Server, provide the IP address of its partner vCenter Server and its HTTPS port.

  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. On the Ready to complete page, review the upgrade settings, accept the backup acknowledgment, and click Finish.
  6. Read the shutdown warning message and click OK.
  7. 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.

After the Active node is upgraded, a new Passive and Witness node is created using a clone operation. These nodes are created automatically for Auto Deployment. For Manual Deployment, nodes are not created automatically. You must clone the Passive and Witness VMs and set the cluster mode to enabled.

When the deployment finishes, vCenter Server has high availability protection. You can click Edit to enter Maintenance Mode, Deactivate, or Remove vCenter HA. You can also Initiate vCenter HA failover.

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.

  • Upgrade all vCenter Server instances in the vCenter Single Sign-On domain.
  • After converging a vCenter Server with external Platform Services Controller node tovCenter Server Appliance, you must decommission the original external Platform Services Controller. Decommissioning a Platform Services Controller shuts it down and removes it from the single sign-on domain. See Decommission the Platform Services Controller.

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