How to upgrade vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 to 7.0

VMware
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VMware vCenter 7.0 has been released for several months now and figured it was about time I upgraded my home lab to the latest version.

This post will detail all the steps needed to upgrade vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 to 7.0 without any issues.

Getting Started

Before beginning, I HIGHLY recommended you first check the VMware Interoperability Matrix before performing any upgrade to check compatibility of other VMware products.

Then go download the VCSA 7.0 ISO if you haven’t already and lets get started with the upgrade!

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How to fix Veeam Backup after installing vCenter 6.7 Update 1

Tools
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After upgrading vCenter 6.7 to vCenter 6.7 Update 1 in one of my environments, it was noticed that Veeam backups where failing with the error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object

I’m running Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5 U3a and after doing some digging around, it seems there is an API change in vSphere 6.7 Update 1 that is causing the backups to fail.

While Veeam plans to resolve this issue with their new Update 4 version coming out soon, there is a very simple work around thanks to this forum post.

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Update vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 to 6.7 Update 1

Update vCenter Server Appliance 6.7 to 6.7 Update 1

VMware
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VMware has released vCenter Server 6.7 Update 1 and with comes with a number changes.

One most notable change is the feature complete HTML5 vSphere client. The vSphere client in vCenter 6.7 Update 1 now includes the ability to manage:

  • Host profiles
  • Auto deploy
  • Full vSphere Update Manager (VUM)
  • A new dark theme
  • and vCenter High Availability.

That’s no where near all of the changes though, there are many more changes and updates in the 6.7 Update 1 update. Be sure to read the full release notes here.

In this post we’ll see just how easy it is to upgrade from VCSA 6.7 to VCSA 6.7 Update 1 in just a couple steps!

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How to manually delete NetApp SnapMirror snapshots

VMware
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The other day, one of our volumes in the lab environment filled up. This volume has a couple large VM’s on it, coupled with a couple different Veeam backup jobs running using the native Veeam backup methods as well as using NetApp snap mirror to snapshot the volume and then using Veeam to ship it out to Azure.

At any rate the volume filled up to the point where vCenter wasn’t allowing me to migrate VM’s off the datastore. I really didn’t want to expand the volume just so I could move VM’s off of it.

Instead, I decided to delete some of the older proof of concept snapshots from SnapMirror. Below are the quick and easy steps to clear up some un-used snapshots and free up some space on the datastore.

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Update vCenter Server Appliance from 6.5 to 6.5 Update 1

VMware
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VMware just released VMware vCenter 6.5 Update 1 just last month, in case you’ve missed it check out the release notes as there are a lot of fixes, improvements and additions.

In this post we’ll see just how easy it is to update the VMware VCSA. Before you do any VMware update I’d highly recommend checking out the VMware Interoperability Matrices to check compatibility of other VMware products. Once you’ve done that, lets begin!

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Installing VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5

VMware
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VMware has announced that VMware vSphere 6.5 has gone general available this week. Now installing VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 (VCSA) is even easier as the requirement for the client integration plugin has been removed and now the VCSA appliance is delivered via an ISO image with an installation wizard that’s been broken up into two stages.

The VCSA 6.5 ISO offers two types of installation methods, CLI and GUI install – both availalbe for Windows, Mac and Linux machines. In this guide I’ll walk through the steps of installing VCSA 6.5 using the Windows GUI install.

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Download VMware vCenter & ESXi 6.0 Update 2

VMware
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VMware has released vCenter Server 6.0 Update 2 and ESXi 6.0 Update 2 (build: 3620759) which include a number of new features and fixes. VMware has also released the much anticipate VSAN 6.2 which includes it’s own bunch of new features such as deduplication, compression, QoS, and RAID5/RAID6 Erasure coding.

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vCenter server service won’t start after upgrading 5.5 to Update 3b

VMware
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Just a quick heads up! Over the last week I’ve been upgrading our vCenter servers from version 5.5 to the most recent 5.5 Update 3b version and have ran into a small hiccup.

The upgrade of SSO, Web Client, Inventory Service and even vCenter server all went as expected without any issues. Then I rebooted the vCenter server and after the reboot noticed that the vCenter server service hadn’t started and when I tried to start it manually I then received the following error:

Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

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VMware vSphere 6.0 Update 1 available

VMware
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VMware has released vSphere 6.0 Update 1, ESXi 6.0 U1 and updates for several other VMware products:

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