Upgrading a vSphere Deployment
Jon Hall, Joshua Andrews · 2020
VMware provides tools such as vSphere Update Manager to automate some of the processes and help to implement a reliable upgrade path. This chapter lists the specific issues with upgrading from vCenter 5.5 to vCenter 6.5. With vSphere 5.5, there were multiple components that could be installed either on the vCenter server or on separate servers. With vSphere 6.x, only the Platform Services Controller (what the Single Sign-On server evolved into for version 6) can be installed separately from vCenter. There are essentially two options for upgrading a Windows-based vCenter server from either 5.5 or 6.0: GUI or command line. The VMware upgrade document lists several steps for testing network settings before the upgrade. Once the compatibility checks and prerequisite steps are done and the environment is backed up, one can proceed with upgrading the environment.