vSphere 5.5

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

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:

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)
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
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.

vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Migration Tool officially GAs w/vSphere 6.0 Update 2m

09.15.2016 by William Lam // 45 Comments

Today, I am very happy to announce that we have released the official Windows vCenter Server to vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Migration Tool which is part of the new VCSA vSphere 6.0 Update 2m release! I know many of you have been asking for an update since we released the VCS to VCSA Convert Appliance Fling a little over a year ago. The Fling was pretty limited in functionality and this was by design so that we could quickly get something out to our customers and get some early feedback. Although I could not say anything, the VMware Engineering team have been very hard at work incorporating all of the feedback in how they designed and built the official VCSA Migration Tool that you see today.

With that, I would like to extend a huge thanks to all of our customers who took part in the Fling and provided feedback both in the comments section as well as reaching out to me through the various channels. It was great to engage with literally hundreds of customers of all sizes and segments, all looking to move away from a Windows-based vCenter Server to the VCSA. Lastly, I want to thank our VMware Engineering team, both to the folks who lead the initial effort on the Fling prototype to those who then productized it! I was very fortunate to have been part of this amazing milestone at VMware.

The VCSA Migration Tool workflow is quite different from how the Fling had worked which hopefully customers will appreciate. The team worked really hard on trying to simplify the overall user experience as well as trying to minimize the overall amount of downtime for the migration. In addition, we have also added full support for additional configurations and deployment topologies which you can find more details in the resource link below which includes an FAQ which I *highly* recommend folks have a look at before starting or asking further questions.

Collection of all #migrate2vcsa Links / Resources: vmwa.re/migrate2vcsalinks

Here is a quick video that I had recorded earlier which demonstrates a migration from a Windows vSphere 5.5 environment to VCSA 6.0 Update 2m, hopefully this will give you a nice overview of the migration process.

[UI Demo] - Migration of Windows vCenter Server 5.5 to vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 Update 2m from lamw on Vimeo.

One last thing I want to quickly mention is that this release is specifically targeted at customers looking to migrate from a Windows vCenter Server 5.5 to the VCSA 6.0 Update 2, hence the letter "m" denotation. If you are NOT looking to migrate your Windows vCenter Server to the VCSA, this release is NOT applicable to you as you will NOT be able to perform a new install and/or upgrade using this release. Instead, you should be looking at the vSphere 6.0 Update 2 release which is the exact same code base that vSphere 6.0 Update 2m is based off of. This will be even more apparent when you launch the VCSA Installer, as the "Migrate" button is the only option as shown in the screenshot below.

For those planning to attend VMworld this year, we do plan to have several sessions covering the new VCSA Migration Tool as well as some other surprises 🙂 I hope to see you there and if you have any comments or feedback, feel free to leave it here or use the #migrate2vcsa hashtag if you are on Twitter, especially if you are interested in some of the surprises at VMworld.

Quick Tip - How to disable the landing page for vCenter Server 5.x & 6.x?

07.25.2016 by William Lam // 2 Comments

The question of wanting to disable the default landing page for the vCenter Server is one that comes up infrequently. In fact, I probably see this maybe once or twice a year. However, when it does come up, it usually revolves around two topics: some sort of security risk and limiting users from obtaining software provided through these landing pages. In both case, simply disabling these landing pages will not solve either of these perceived issues.

I generally find these landing pages quite useful as they provide links to software downloads such as our legacy vSphere C# Client, SDK documentation as well as links to other interfaces to vCenter Server like the vSphere Web Client login, the datastore browser or the vSphere MOB. All of this information can be obtained through other official channels, so simply disabling this page does not really prevent users from downloading this content or accessing these interfaces.

On the second topic around security (which by no means am I an expert in), some customers feel that simply removing these default landing pages would some how prevent a security risk because a version of the software is no longer listed on that page? This is what some folks would call security through obscurity which just does not work. There are many different ways of identifying a version of vCenter Server and some of its components as well checking if the service is running. Simply removing these pages does little to nothing from stopping someone from retrieving this information using other methods. Instead, users should really be focusing how they are implementing security both in the software as well as the policies and processes they have in place which hopefully are inline with modern security practices.

In fact, by disabling some of these pages, you might even be hurting your overall customer experience depending on their familiarity with vCenter Server.

In any case, for those that are still inclined to disable these pages, below are the instructions on how to disable the various landing pages as I have not really seen this documented anywhere. The solution is actually quite simple which is to just rename the index files to something else which will prevent them from being loaded by the webserver.

Landing page for vCenter Server 5.x

Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\docRoot\index.html
VCSA: /etc/vmware-vpx/docRoot/index.html

Tomcat landing page for vCenter Server 5.x

Windows VC: C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps\ROOT\index.jsp
VCSA: /usr/lib/vmware-vpx/tomcat/webapps/tomcat/webapps/ROOT/index.jsp

Landing page for vCenter Server 6.x

Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\docRoot\index.html
VCSA: /etc/vmware-vpx/docRoot/index.html

Landing page for Platform Services Controll (vSphere 6.x)

Windows VC: C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\runtime\VMwareSTSService\webapps\websso\WEB-INF\views\index.jsp
VCSA: /usr/lib/vmware-sso/vmware-sts/webapps/websso/WEB-INF/views/index.jsp