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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VMware vSphere 7 announced

VMware
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VMware vSphere 7

Some pretty big news coming out of VMware today. The announcement of VMware vSphere 7 to become available May 1, 2020! One of the biggest item coming out of this news so far is that vSphere 7 will come in two options.

The first being vSphere 7 as we all have known it to be for years and then the second being vSphere 7 with Kubernetes which will be available through VMware Cloud Foundation and is a new generation of vSphere for containerized applications.

Other notables is that the flash based vSphere client is FINALLY no more! From here on out, only the HTML 5 will exist. vCenter Server on Windows will also finally be put to rest and new deployments of vCenter server will be done using the tried and tested vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) based on PhotonOS linux.

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How to convert VMDK to OVF file format

VMware
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Here is a quick and easy way to convert a VMDK to OVF file format using the OVF Tool from VMware.

  1. First download and install the VMware OVF Tool for your operating system.
  2. Open a command prompt as Administrator and navigate to the OVF Tool install directory: 
    
cd C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool

    vmdk to ovf command prompt

  3. Next, type in the following command to convert VMDK to OVF: 
    
ovftool.exe \virtualmachine.vmx \virtualmachine.ovf

    convert vmdk to ovf command

After a few minutes time you should you should see a “Transfer Completed, Completed successfully” message and your VMDK to OVF file conversion is complete and ready for use.
convert vmdk to ovf complete

VMware Site Recovery Manager 8.2 – No more Windows

VMware
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VMware has just announced the release of Site Recovery Manager 8.2. There are a number of new items in SRM 8.2, such as enhancements to the HTML5 user interface, support for vSphere 6.7 Update 2, but most notably is Site Recovery Manager 8.2 virtual appliance!

No more Microsoft Windows license needed! The SRM 8.2 virtual appliance runs on the Photon OS distro, which is similar to what the vCenter virtual appliance has been running on for years now.

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Dell R720 Server

My VMware ESXi Home Lab Upgrade

Home Lab
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Although the focus in my career right now is certainly more cloud focused in Amazon Web Services and Azure, I still use my home lab a lot.

For the last 5+ years my home lab had consisted of using 3x Intel NUC’s (i5 DC53427HYE), a Synology NAS for shared storage and an HP ProCurve switch. This setup served me well for most of those years. It has allowed me to get many of the certifications I have, progress in my career and have fun as well.

At the start of this year I decided it was time to give the home lab an overhaul. At first I looked at the newest generation of Intel NUC’s but really wasn’t looking forward to dropping over $1,300 on just partial compute (I’d still need to be RAM for each of the 3 NUC’s). I also wanted something that just worked, no more fooling around with network adapter drivers or doing this tweak or that tweak.

I also no longer needed to be concerned about something that had a tiny footprint. I also questioned if I really needed multiple physical ESXi hosts. My home lab isn’t running anything mission critical and if I really wanted I could always build additional nested VMware ESXi hosts on one powerful machine if I needed.

So in the end, the below is what I settled on. Replacing all of my compute, most of my networking and adding more storage!

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VMware vCenter Service Appliance Update

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 upgrade ESXi 6.5 to ESXi 6.7

VMware
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VMware released ESXi 6.7 a little while ago, but it’s only been here recently have I started deploying it in my home and work lab environments. Below are two ways to easily upgrade your ESXi 6.5 hosts to ESXi 6.7 using the command line or by using the VMware ESXi offline bundle.

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VMware Update Manager U3e upgrade failing? Un-install it!

VMware
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VMware Update Manager U3e error

I was recently upgrading a VMware environment from vCenter Server Update 3b to Update 3e and during the scheduled change I had also planned on upgrading VMware Update Manager to Update 3e and ran into the following error:

VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vthread-3)
GetProcAddress: Failed to resolve ENGINE)load_aesni: 127
You can request support.

Looking for a possible solution at the VMware Knowledge Base came back with no results and to error message wasn’t overly useful either with “VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vthread-3)” as Workstation wasn’t installed on this server.

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Power off an unresponsive VM using ESXTOP

VMware
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Just recently we have some hardware issues in our primary datacenter and during that time had a few VM’s that became unresponsive and needed to get them back online. The VM’s had stopped responding to the normal vSphere commands to reboot, shutdown or even restart. I didn’t want to power cycle the entire ESXi host and instead just power off an unresponsive VM.

Here is a quick and easy way to do just that using ESXTOP.

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