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You are here: Home / vSphere 6.5 / Will I get Photon OS when I upgrade my VCSA 5.5/6.0 to VCSA 6.5?

Will I get Photon OS when I upgrade my VCSA 5.5/6.0 to VCSA 6.5?

11.04.2016 by William Lam // 7 Comments

upgrade-vcsa-55-60-to-vcsa65
There seems to be a bit of confusion on how the upgrade from an existing vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 5.5/6.0 to the upcoming VCSA 6.5 release will work. I suspect part of the confusion is also due to the fact that the underlying OS in the VCSA in vSphere 6.5 is changing from SLES to VMware's very own Photon OS. Before going into the upgrade details, I do want to mention that with this change, VMware will now own the entire software stack within the VCSA (OS + Application). This will allow VMware to quickly respond and deliver OS and security updates to customers at a much quicker rate than it was possible before. In addition, Photon OS is also a very optimized Linux distribution which has allowed VMware to significantly improve the reboot and startup time of the vCenter Server application. To be clear, the vCenter Server application itself is NOT running as a Docker Container nor are there any other application or services within the VCSA that is running a Docker Container, I know this was something folks were also assuming because the OS changed to Photon OS.

Now going back to the upgrade question, how would an upgrade work if the underlying OS is changing? The answer is actually quite simple. VCSA upgrades are "Migration" based upgrades and has been since the very first release of the VCSA in vSphere 5.0.

So how does it work? Here is the high level workflow:

  1. The new VCSA 6.5 is deployed using the standard VCSA UI or CLI installer using the "Upgrade" option. It does require a temporarily IP Address (DHCP or Static)
  2. The VCSA 6.5 then connects to the existing VCSA 5.5/6.0 and starts copying (migrate) the data from the old VCS to the new VCSA
  3. The existing VCSA 5.5/6.0 is then shutdown, the new VCSA 6.5 now takes over the personality of the original VCSA and you have now successfully upgraded

As you can see from this workflow, your existing VCSA is not actually being upgraded but rather its data is migrated over to the new VCSA. Once the upgrade has completed, you will now be on the new Photon OS based VCSA. Hopefully this clears up any confusion 🙂

Lastly, I should also mention that in vSphere 6.5, we have an updated version of the VCSA Migration Tool simliar to the one release with vSphere 6.0 Update 2m. It will now support migrating from a Windows-based vCenter Server running either vSphere 5.5 or vSphere 6.0 to VCSA 6.5.

More from my site

  • Updates to VMDK partitions & disk resizing in VCSA 6.5
  • How to deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 running on VMware Fusion & Workstation?
  • How to run a Docker Container on the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5?
  • How to automate the deployment of an un-configured VCSA 6.5 (Stage 1 only)?
  • vCenter Server High Availability (VCHA) PowerCLI 6.5 community module

Categories // vSphere 6.5 Tags // vcenter server appliance, vcsa, VCSA 6.5, vcva, vSphere 5.5, vSphere 6.0, vSphere 6.5

Comments

  1. Tom Otomanski says

    11/06/2016 at 4:45 am

    Thanks for the post William. From my side the confusion relates to not doing any previous vCSA upgrades for major releases. Looking forward to migrating the remainder of our Windows based vCenter Servers to the vCSA though!

    Reply
  2. Xana says

    11/08/2016 at 4:18 am

    This is really impressive stuff from VMware. Cant wait to lab this.

    Reply
  3. Ken Sliger says

    11/10/2016 at 12:13 pm

    Thanks for the explanation!

    Reply
  4. Raymond Franco says

    11/30/2016 at 12:31 pm

    Hi William,

    How does this work for naming conventions, when doing the "migration". Would the New VCSA(6.5) continue with the same settings and information (IP, hostname etc)as VCSA (6.0)?

    Reply
    • Aldin says

      12/15/2016 at 5:39 am

      yes.

      "3. The existing VCSA 5.5/6.0 is then shutdown, the new VCSA 6.5 now takes over the personality of the original VCSA and you have now successfully upgraded"

      Reply
  5. Nicholas Wilson says

    12/13/2016 at 9:20 am

    How does this work with vDS? Say we have 80+ hosts connected to several different vDS - does it move the ESXi hosts to the new VCSA 6.5 without disruption?

    Reply
  6. Fereidoun Fatahiany says

    12/23/2016 at 11:32 am

    The biggest problem I am finding is the DNS server. It just not working.

    Reply

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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