Upgrade a vCenter Server Appliance by Using the CLI

You can use the CLI installer to perform an unattended upgrade of a vCenter Server appliance or Platform Services Controller appliance. You must run the CLI upgrade from a Windows, Linux, or Mac machine that is in the same network as the appliance that you want to upgrade.

Prerequisites

See Prerequisites for Upgrading the vCenter Server Appliance.
Prepare Your JSON Configuration File for CLI Upgrade.
Review the arguments for running the CLI upgrade. See Syntax of the CLI Upgrade Command.
Verify that the user name with which you are logged in to your machine, the path to the vCenter Server appliance installer, the path to your JSON configuration file, and the string values in your JSON configuration file contain only ASCII characters. Extended ASCII and non-ASCII characters are not supported.

Procedure

Navigate to the vcsa-cli-installer subdirectory for your operating system.
- If you are running the upgrade on Windows, navigate to the vcsa-cli-installer\win32 directory.
- If you are running the upgrade on Linux, navigate to the vcsa-cli-installer/lin64 directory.
- If you are running the upgrade on Mac, navigate to the vcsa-cli-installer/mac directory.
(Optional) Verify that you prepared the upgrade template correctly by running a basic template verification.
```
vcsa-deploy upgrade --verify-template-only path_to_the_json_file
```
(Optional) Gather and validate the upgrade requirements by running a pre-upgrade check.
```
vcsa-deploy upgrade --precheck-only path_to_the_json_file
```
The pre-upgrade check installs the Upgrade Runner on the source appliance that you want to upgrade without upgrading the appliance.
The Upgrade Runner validates the configurations such as ESXi, network settings, and NTP servers. The Upgrade Runner also checks if you have selected a suitable deployment size and storage size for the new appliance against the compute resources required for the upgrade.
Perform the upgrade by running the following command.
```
vcsa-deploy upgrade --accept-eula optional_arguments path_to_the_json_file
```
Use optional_arguments to enter space-separated arguments to set additional execution parameters of the upgrade command.
For example, you can set the location of the log and other output files that the installer generates. This example also confirms participation in the VMware Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). If the ceip_enabled parameter is set to true in the JSON deployment template, you must include the argument --acknowledge-ceip.
```
vcsa-deploy upgrade --accept-eula --acknowledge-ceip --log-dir=path_to_the_location path_to_the_json_file
```

What to do next

Verify Your vCenter Server Upgrade or Migration Is Successful.