Category: v5.5

It’s been well over a year since I’ve been here (well, closer to 18 months, really).  I’ll apologize for that now 🙂

The reality, though, is that it’s been a long, exhausting, and rewarding year and a half, and I’ve taken on some different responsibilities at work.  That’s taken up quite a bit of my time.  I decided I just needed to roll some of that time together with this blog.  Well, at least some of the fruits of that work.

We’ve just released the latest, greatest version of vSphere – vSphere 5.5  With a new version comes a need to upgrade.

Some of you may be using the vCenter Server Appliance.  There’s an Update feature in the appliance to help update from one version to another.  But right next to that in the management UI is a tab called Upgrade.  And that’s the process I’ve just stepped through for you.  Keep in mind here that I haven’t read any of the upgrade KBs (shame on me), but this is a relatively intuitive process, I think.  

Take a look at the video – it’s about 20 minutes long – some time has been shaved off; the entire process took me about an hour, but you don’t want to watch a bunch of silence and spinning wheels, do you?  I didn’t think so.

I will throw out a caveat (that I didn’t show onscreen) that I did have to regenerate the self-signed certificates before the Web Client worked properly.  

Test this process extensively before you try this in a production environment!! Please, don’t try this blindly!

I learned quite a bit during this process, and I hope it helps you a bit.