First step will be to take a snapshot of the vCenter, if you are running Enhanced Linked Mode, ensure you power all vCenters off and take cold-snapshots from the Host UI.
Because the upgrade deploys a new vCenter appliance, we will be renaming our existing VM object from ‘vCenter’ to ‘vCenter_old’
Accessing good old fashioned ui-installer wizard, will be selecting ‘Upgrade’
This will be a various of steps, for Step 1. It will be ‘Deploy a vCenter’, this step is to begin the deployment of a new VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance)
After accepting EULA, the next step will be to ‘Connector to Source Appliance’ this would be the hostname of the VM (not the VM object name in vCenter)
I will then put in the landing vCenter I want to deploy the new appliance too.
For Step 5 you will select a Folder location for the VM, followed by Step 6 which is select a Compute Resource.
Step 7 will ask for the name of the new VM appliance and desired root password
For Step 8 you will select the deployment size of the new appliance. These in every environment will vary and always plan for anticipated future growth.
The next step will be to deploy a datastore, I will personally be deploying and will select a storage location, I will select storage and will enable ‘Thin Provisioning”
The next step to select the portgroup assigned to the desired network and a temporary IP address for the VCSA because at the end of the upgrade, all the network settings remain the same for the new appliance.
This is the final configuration for this part of the upgrade, it will be followed by confirmation and then waiting for installation to complete.
Once the installation is completed, you should receive the following confirmation, from here you can prompt, notice that you do have a temporary VAMI interface to the new vCenter in the event you have to do any troubleshooting. The installer should continue.
The beginning of the wizard should only prompt one option and that is the 2nd step. Click Continue.
These are the warnings that appeared in my environment, these should allow me to proceed
The next step is to select what information do you want copied over, I personally want to choose both, my environment is smaller. Click Next.
For the final steps, it will be the option to join CEIP followed by confirming you performed backup and then kicking off process.
During the process you will lose connectivity to your vCenter, you can always look for one of the hosts the vCenter is residing in and monitor from console.
And just like that…we upgraded to 8 successfully.
For future blogs I will try and dive into vSphere 8 features more in depth.
