vCenter (VCSA) 6.5 U2 upgrade to vCenter (VCSA) 6.7 U2
Last Updated: 8/20/19
My recommedned steps for upgrading your vCenter appliance 6.5 Update 2 (VCSA) to VCSA 6.7 Update 2.
Do not patch your old appliance to the latest verison!
These is a matrix of compatible versions that can be upgraded. if you patch your old appliance too far, you can't upgrade to the version you want!
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/67077
Remove all vCenter plugins first
Unregistering your vCenter plugins will save you headaches later when the upgrade wizard fails prechecks even though you have already invested time. For me this was plugins like Dell OpenManage and Nimble storage plugins (yes, VASA too). If you remove your VASA provider your vVols will continue to work, just do NOT power off, power on, backup, or vMotion while VASA provider is not registered. Be sure to reregister VASA providers immediately after vCenter upgrades properly. If your upgrade goes south and you go back to your old VCSA, be sure to reregister VASA providers!
Have Enough Free Space
There is a know issue when upgrading from 6.5 where the root partition '/' won't have enough free space and the wizard allows you to direct the migration to use a different path, but the process still uses root path '/' and fails. The VMware official solution involves either freeing up space in root or using the CLI version of the upgrade tool. Neither option seemed good to me, so I used a bootable live linux ISO (Gparted) to expand the root partition. This worked great! NOTE: I cloned by VCSA and perfromed these unsupported partition changes to the clone to keep risk low. I then migrated the data from the VCSA clone to VCSA 6.7.
complete the wizard for deploy and migration to VCSA 6.7.
reregister VASA!
reregister vCenter plugins.
