Updating vCenter 6.5 with DC-DR replication enabled and vCenter HA enabled to 6.7U2

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Home > VMWare platform > VMWare vCenter > Updating vCenter 6.5 with DC-DR replication enabled and vCenter HA enabled to 6.7U2

It is possible to upgrade vCenter 6.5 with DC-DR replication configured with SRM and vSphere replication 8.x without replications getting affected (Stopped / Disabled). For this we mount vCenter 6.7.0U2 ISO file and run the GUI installer and go through the ugprade process. First update DR PSC and vCenter (Assuming cold DR). Then after 24 hours of observation update DC PSC and vCenter. Check the compatibility of new vCenter version in VMWare interoperability matrix - https://interopmatrix.vmware.com/#/Interoperability while planning the upgrade.


Note that from 6.7.0 onwards it is recommended to have embedded PSC. For that first upgrade PSC and vCenter from 6.5 to 6.7. Then go via converge process to convert from external PSC to embedded PSC. Refer:


However, if there is vCenter HA enabled on existing vCenter 6.5 then there is a problem. We cannot disable HA with HTML 5 UI and vCenter upgrade requires HA to be disabled before we can upgrade from 6.5 to 6.7. For this use following steps to disable HA:

  1. In work nodes note the following for all three (Active / Passive / Witness):
    ESXi host
    IP addresses and VLANs
    Datastores
  2. Then login into each vCenter appliance (ACtive / PAssive and Witness) via ESXi console (Note use of ESXi console instead of vCenter console, as during next steps vCenter console would stop working)
  3. Login into each vCenter appliance using ESXi console as root and open shell
  4. In each appliance type:
    ip addr show
    and find which appliance is active (Has vCenter IP address mapped to vCenter FQDN) and which other is passive.
  5. Note that there are 'vcha' and 'vcha-reset-primary' commands to change which node is active / which is passive. We did not need to try that as in our case desired node was already active.
  6. Poweroff the passive and witness appliance using:
    poweroff
  7. Now the vCenter UI would stop working and its IP will also not ping. At this poing remove vCenter HA configuration from active node using:
    destroy-vcha -f
  8. After this reboot the vCenter node so that it becomes standalone.
    reboot
  9. Ideally after 24 hours of observation Delete the older witness and PSC appliances.

Refer:



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