vCSA

Todays post will focus on upgrade from vCenter Server 7.x to 8.x. Process itself isn’t very complicated and in normal environment should take around 1h. Let’s dive into it!

Today I wanted to install a fresh vCenter Server Appliance for further automatic provisioning with Terraform. When I wanted to install the vCenter Server Appliance I faced an error while I tried to mount ISO in Finder and execute the install.

I am quite busy with keeping my Homelab up to date and I faced strange issue with upgrading vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 to 6.7. The fix is rather easy but let’s identify the issues first.

vSphere 6.7 was released a few months ago but recently I finally found a few minutes of time to upgrade my Homelab to vSphere 6.7.

You can read more about new features introduced in vSphere 6.7 on VMware blog https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2018/04/introducing-vcenter-server-6-7.html.

Today I will show you how you can easily upgrade vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 to version 6.7.

My lab hasn’t been used for a few weeks due to business in a Project. As I have a VCIX6-NV exam on this Friday I had to refresh my knowledge and prepare myself a bit before I try to pass it. I was quite surprised when I logged into the lab and it was down. After quick login to ESXi, I discovered an error on vCSA and PSC - Failed to start File System Check on /dev/dis…uuid. Today I will show you what needs to be done after such failure to recover your vCSA / PSC appliance.

vCenter Server (be it the appliance or not) is the critical management component of every vSphere environment. Therefore it is critical to backup it at regular basis to have the possibility to restore configuration prior to failure. With the vSphere 6.5 release, vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) received the possibility to perform the backup of its configuration from appliance management interface (not only but I will describe this later on).

In the next article describing vSphere 6.5, I will show you how to upgrade vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 to a newer version.

In Today post I will focus on installation of vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 with External Platform Services Controller. As I am working with more complex customer environments there was a need to make my lab a bit more advanced as it was in the past.

vSphere 6.5 is on the market for quite a bit of time. In most cases, customers don’t perform upgrade immediately after the release of new software. It was the same with my home lab. I wanted to take a holistic approach and perform an upgrade to the latest and greatest release of all products I have in my home lab. In this first post, I will show you upgrade process of all components I use.

In my earlier post vCenter Server Appliance 6 (vCSA) installation I guided you through vCenter Server Appliance 6 installation. Next step is to configure our Appliance so we can use it in our environments.