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 deployment 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. 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.
  4. 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.
  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, Auto Deployment automatically creates new Passive and Witness nodes using a clone operation. For Manual Deployment, nodes are not created automatically. You must clone the Passive and Witness virtual machines, 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

For information about configuring and managing vCenter HA, see vSphere Availability.