Trying to upgrade Vcenter 5.5 to 6.0

[Badaz52]

Hi,

 

We are trying to upgrade Vcenter 5.5 to 6.0 and I have encountered a problem that I am not sure how to overcome. When the Vcenter server itself was installed it was setup as a virtual machine within our cluster. This was done by an engineer and not by me. Unfortunately hot add cpu/ram was not enabled on this machine and I need to increase the RAM to 8176mb and enable 2 processors to be able to proceed with the upgrade to Vcenter 6.0.

 

The problem is how can I do this bearing in mind I cannot alter the memory/ram settings unless the host is switched off meaning it will kick me out of the vsphere client.

 

Surely there is a way around this VMware support Vcenter server as a VM itself so surely there must be a way around this?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Cheers!

[RobD]

You'll need to connected directly to the host via the vsphere client and then update it.

[Badaz52]

Is this the only way it can be done? not sure if I am up for a bit of command line lol

[RobD]

No you shouldn't need to do it via command line. When you open vsphere client on your PC, just change the IP/Name bit to the name of the host that vsphere server is hosted on.

[Badaz52]

I see, it doesn't seem to want to let me in with the same credentials I use to connect to Vcenter. I have tried the SSO login too but no luck.

[RobD]

The username will be root if that helps?

[Davit2005]

Many people I have spoken to have advised against upgrade from 5.1 to 6 due to SSO rework, maybe there are implications on 5.5 to 6 as well.

 

You might be better building a new vCenter and transfering hosts accross and then upgrading hosts from there.

 

If you use profiles and Rules I guess these must be transferred also.

[Badaz52]

The username will be root if that helps?

 

I'm in!

[Badaz52]

Well I managed to get through the entire upgrade from 5.5 to 6 to be greeted with this message upon upgrading the sql to postgresql:

 

“Upgrade import step failed” and “vPostgres firstboot(action=firstboot) failed”

 

Trouble is it has uninstalled 5.5 already and the only thing I have to work from is the export folder, not really sure where I can go with this now.

[RobD]

Urrgh, sounds like a new vSphere server to me.

 

Unless you can work through this: VMware KB: Recovering from a failed upgrade of vCenter Server 5.1 or 5.5 to 6.0

[Badaz52]

Urrgh, sounds like a new vSphere server to me.

 

Unless you can work through this: VMware KB: Recovering from a failed upgrade of vCenter Server 5.1 or 5.5 to 6.0

 

The one odd thing I have noticed but not sure if it is affecting it is during the install phase it hangs at "installing component - vcsservicemanager" and at this point the system time goes about an hour and a half out of sync, could this be causing the problem? if I resync the time is OK till this point then goes out again.

 

VMware Tools is still installed and appears to stop and start during the upgrade process, should I disable the service and try the upgrade again?

Edited August 4, 2015 by Badaz52

[Badaz52]

Hmm, I think this is a time related issue. If I disable VMware Tools on the Vcenter server and run the upgrade again it gets a lot further but still produces the same error message.

[RobD]

I'm guessing the time is either set by a DC or by the host itself, so may be worth checking those first. You could try and stop the service but I'm not sure it'll help, to be honest if you start again you could probably get all this done in a hour!