Has anyone upgraded vCenter from 6.7 to 7.0 for a Hyperflex Cluster?

[RedNectar]

Hi experts,

I have a customer who needs to upgrade their HXDP from v6.7 to 7.0U2 - but first they need to upgrade vCenter to v7.0 maintaining the same IP etc - and of course the HyperFlex plugin.

I'm TEMPTED to advise that they:

1. deploy vCenter with a new IP address, same Datacenter names, same cluster names and same features enabled,
2. then remove each ESXi server from the existing vCenter
3. and add the hosts to the new vCenter.

My belief is (and this is really where I need a bit of expert help) that the HX ESXi hosts will still communicate happily during this process and existing VMs will not be impacted as far as access the HXDP storage.

Once the ESXi hosts have been moved, we'd then have to:

1. Shut down the old vCenter
2. Change the IP address of the new vCenter to match the FQDN of the old vCenter
   1. Possibly clear ARP cache on the vCenter's gateway if communication doesn't begin immediately
3. run the stcli cluster reregister command on a storage controller VM to re-register the cluster with the NEW vCenter
4. Re-install the vCenter plugin

Once this has been completed, we could then run the ESXi upgrade package via HX Connect to complete the process.

However, the customer is keen to do an "in-place" upgrade of vCenter...

If anyone has done the complete 6.7 to 7.0 upgrade on a live HX system eiterh as above or "in-place" who can validate my logic or share their experience, I'd be grateful.