Upgrading vCenter

Let me start by having a firm base, a working vCenter 7 with a proper connected Veeam server. Since my server is dead I’m going to start from scratch.

Pre-req Step (Base vCenter 7 with Veeam)

Other Pre-reqs:
DNS server (or local host records)

Step 1) Install vCenter 7

20 minutes later, complete. Now I made one mistake along the way (to replicate what I think happened the first go around) and that was to give the VM name vCenter.zewwy.ca, while when configuring the network FQDN I gave it vcenter.zewwy.ca. After install, I was able to replicate the findings I had from my first go around which I now know will cause and upgrade problem for the upgrade to vCenter 8. When this is done, the install wizard has no issues with this and the install will complete successfully. However now the hostname with have a uppercase, while the PNID will have a lowercase:

It’s this case while will cause the upgrade to have hiccups which I’ll cover below. However, I need to add my hosts which were connected to my previous upgrade, let’s see if it’ll take my hosts…

Step 2) I followed my blog post to fix up my Veeam jobs again. 

Step 3) Upgrade to vCenter 8.

• Get ISO from Broadcom Support portal.
• Mount ISO to Client machine that has access to vCenter/ESXi hosts.
• Run Installer GUI (I’ll use Windows in this blog)
• Deploy new vCenter
• 
  
  ERROR “Unable to find the source appliance on the specified ESXi host or vCenter Server”

Stage 1 Error

Remember when I showed above the mistake I made by entering the FQDN without a capital when configuring the network when I ran the vCenter7 installer. Putting lower case here, provided the above error, to get past it had to use the case sensitive hostname with a capital.

Stage 2 Error

Now pick your host and you have another error to bypass at Stage 2.

I had another weird issue where even though the VM deployed, it was not reachable over the network and the installer timed out. To resolve this I simply changed the VM network VMPG, saved, and then changed it back to the proper one saved, and it was pingable. To get back to stage 2 simly navigate to the VAMI web page on port 5480. When you get to the stage to connect to the source you enter the details and get this error at the pre-upgrade checks:

changing the vcenter source entry again to a capital as we did before will not work the same error pops up showing to go to that blog post on how to change the FQDN. Since my FQDN already looked correct (with a capital), but the command was showing (the PNID) was with a lower case, Instead of changing the FQDN to be lowercase, and going through all the steps in that blog (there are a lot) I simply set the PNID to have a capital in it

Get:

/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vmafd-cli get-pnid --server-name localhost

Set:

/usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/vmafd-cli set-pnid --server-name localhost --pnid vCenter.mydomain.com

Yay no more error:

Now pick your content to migrate, and at this point you should stop using vCenter for the duration of the migration.

At this point the Pings dropped (roughly 12 no reponse at about 1-2 minute down time…. then they came back up as the new vCenter IP changed over. At which point step 2 began.

I went to play a bit of party animals, it had timed out on the old vami IP, which the installer may have auto switched over, but logging into VAMI on the new server showed everything was green.

Logging in, everything looks good, checking Veeam yup, rescan of vcenter worked without issue, check re-calculating VM on a backup job, yup it works.

Success. This post doesn’t cover additional steps (applying new license keys, checking using migrations (vsphere.local), remoting loging services or connections (rsyslog)) all those you’d have to verify after completing these steps. Now to upgrade the ESXi hosts, both esxi hosts remained on 7.0.3x versions for this post.