VMW vcenter Upgrade & ACI VMM

[bolamiposi]

What we are actually trying to achieve is a situation where we have our ACI version 4.2(3l) Fabric with VMM integration to our current Vcenter6 in UCS chassis.

We are now upgrading to vcenter 6.7 residing on a new blade within same UCS chassis and then move all our current VM’s from the vcenter 6 to the new 6.7.

The ask is how successfully can we achieve this VMM integration from our ACI Fabric to the new vcenter 6.7 and having a near to zero outage experience with the migration.

Any thought and guidance on how to achieve this? Anyone gone through similar Upgrade?

[Robert Burns]

Can I ask why you're not just upgrading your existing vCenter to 6.7?  From above sounds like your plan is to deploy a new vCenter instance which will really complicate things. If you are hard set on deploying a new vCenter you have two options from what I can see - 1) You deploy a mixed mode linked VC - so both vCenters can manage the same Hosts.  This would be the easiest route.  Options 2) is deploying a completely separate vCenter in which case you'd have to unregister each Host from the old 6.0 VC and register it with the new 6.7 VC.  This would also mean you'd need to create a new VMM domain and bind all your EPGs to this VMM domain as well -  As you can see this gets really messy and I don't see a simple way of doing this without disruption. 

I'd highly recommend you take a snapshot of your 6.0 vCenter and do an in-place upgrade to 6.7.  This wouldn't impact anything from an ACI perspective and you could do this with no impact (assuming you're not planning on doing any VM migrations during the upgrade period.

Robert

[bolamiposi]

Thanks for your response, advice and directives. 

I will take actions in reviewing why we aren't upgrading our current vcenter 6.0 to vcenter 6.7, which seems to be the preferred recommendation. I believe its because we are having to upgrade some other dependency database (Netapp), which is going to go through some upgrade as well. 

If we go with option 1, could we still retire the old vcenter6.0 even if they are in mixed mode?

Option 2 is actually the plan we had envisage to go with and hence was about to go through creating the new VMM domain first, and then go through binding all our EPGs. That is where my first question comes in place, could we bind the EPGs to two VMM domains simultaneously, before retiring the old VMM domain and the old vcenter 6.0? Or what would be the precise way to perform this activity, with the thought of not accommodating some disruption until when we are unregistering each host from the old vcenter 6.0 and registering it with new vcenter 6.7?