ITOPS

Though, lot of articles and useful blogs in respect to vCenter update, I couldn’t get blogs states Physical vCenter (Embedded installation) update with migrate to virtual appliance in order to enable VCHA.

Scenario: We are running vCenter in a physical server-windows based with embedded (PSC and VC) installation which needs to be migrated to VCSA with considering VCHA feature enable.

Scope & Objective: To align our infrastructure with latest updates, vCenter components should be updated to latest version 6.5 (currently latest) and also we have to enable VCHA solution for vCenter failover.

vCenter Server : Physical Server / Windows 2012 / PSC and vCenter embedded installation with SQL external database.

The below plan explains the steps to migrate and separate vCenter server components.

1. Add secondary PSC (appliance) to existing vCenter Server 6.0.
2. Repoint current PSC (physical) to external.                                                                             Output : PSC separated from physical vCenter Server 6.0
3. Update PSC using vCenter  update option
4. Migrate vCenter using vCenter migration tool to obtain vCenter 6.5 appliance.            Output : vCenter and PSC migrated to appliance with 6.5 version.    

Advantages:

1. No down time for user workloads.
2. The physical Server will be automatically powered down during vCenter migration
3. Since there is no change on vCenter (existing database), We can power on any time in the event of any steps failure or unforeseen issues.