vSphere 6.5: The new vCenter server appliance finally here – how to migrate!

VMWARE has just released vSphere 6.5 offering a lot of new and great features:

vSphere 6.5 – Release Notes

vSphere 6.5 – Whitepaper What’s new

From my perspective, the biggest feature is the new “VMware vCenter Server 6.0 with an embedded VMware Platform Services Controller”

The VCSA have been having a rough start in the early days, db errors and unresponsiveness, and most of all, the lack of Update Manager, but as of now, things look different, and it also has a migration tool from going from vCenter server windows to appliance! 🙂

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2016/10/whats-new-in-vsphere-6-5-vcenter-server.html

migration

So, let’s say you have a Windows vCenter server, you want to migrate to VCSA, then do the following:

When you download the ISO, you will find theese folders on it:

The “vcsa-ui-installer” folder has a win32 folder in it, in there, run the installer.exe and choose to MIGRATE

(Remember to run the installer an another server that is not the vcenter source server, because it will be shut down!)

As you can see on top, a Migration Assistant is needed:

Connect to source server

Specify the source Windows vCenter server, vCenter SSO, or Platform Services Controller that you want to migrate. Make sure the Migration Assistant is running on the source. The Migration Assistant executable is included in the vCenter Server Appliance ISO image.

 So from the ISO image copy the folder “migration-assistant” to the deskop of the source vcenter server and run the file called:

You will be promptet for the password for the administrator@vpshere.local account, type it in a wait until the screen looks like this:

Go back to the VCSA installer and continue:

When adding the source server for hosting the appliance, type in the IP of

the ESXI host:

Name your VCSA and set it’s password:

Set size:

It’s quite hungry for memory, but isn’t everything that theese days 🙂

Select datastores:

Give it a temporary ip, it will take the ip that the source vcenter server uses, once it’s finished!:

Check all is good and press finish:

And we’re on the move with stage 1:

After several minutes, we see this:

And we are ready to continue:

Press Next to begin migration:

It will do some migration checks and will show this “warning”:

It’s all okay, you can close this and continue:

Enter your AD domain credentials to join the VCSA to the domain:

Choose how much you want to migrate.

And YES we want to help VMWARE improve 🙂

If all looks good, we can continue with stage 2 🙂 – Press Finish

(Remember to confirm that you have backed up the source vCenter server!)

Getting aware of that, we click OK:

Datamigration af the final stage 2 is now starting.

When you see this, the old server is shut down, and the new VCSA has the same IP and name, as the old vcenter server had.

Remember after this, your old vCenter server has to be deleted (Or renamed with new IP and vmware software removed – but not recommended.)

vSphere “thick” client – the old c#/.net client we used to use, is dead R.I.P., it can no longer connect to vSphere 6.5, the new HTML-5 vsphere client, is now available on https://<vcsa-ip>/ui 🙂

When you want to use Update Manager, you will have to use the old Web Client (Flash), as VUM is not implemented into the HTML-5 client – yet 🙂

You can find the Web Client here:

https:///vsphere-client

Enjoy the cool new VCSA 6.5 🙂

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