Upgrade UCS Environment from vSphere 5.1 to vSphere 6 with Nexus 1000v

[matt.wyatt1]

Hi, I have been battling trying to get help from TAC and researching the internet on the upgrade path for our UCS environment, and as a last resort thought I would try a forum post.

My environment is a UCS Chassis environment with dual pathing, Fabric interconnects, 1110s with HA pair of 1000v running vsphere 5.1.  We have upgraded all of our hardware (blades, C series and UCS Manager) to firmware versions support by CISCO for vSphere 6.

We have even upgraded our Nexus 1000v's to 5.2(1)SV3(1.5a) which is a supported version for vSphere 6.

To save us some processing and licencing costs and performance on our previous vcenter server was lacking and unreliable, I was looking at migrating over to the vCenter 6 virtual appliance.  There is nowhere I can find information that advises on how to undertake the upgrade process for VMWare on UCS when the 1000v is incorporated.  I would have thought that it being a virtual machine that if you have all of your versions upgraded to support versions for 6 it should be smooth sailing.

A response I received from TAC was that we had to move all of our VM's over to a standard switch in order to upgrade the vCenter, but given we are already on a supported version of the 1000v for vSphere 6 it's left me confused, nor would I get the opportunity to rework our environment being a hospital with that sort of downtime and outage windows for over 200 machines.

Can any provide some advice, or has anyone else tried to do a similar upgrade path?

[Kirk J · Accepted solution]

Greetings.

It sounds like you have already upgraded your N1k components (are VEMs upgraded to match?).

Are your questions more about how you are upgrading/migrating from one vcenter server to another?

If you are importing your vcenter database into your new vcenter, then this shouldn't have a bunch of down time, as the VSM/VEMS will still see the vcenter and N1k dVS.  If you are changing name/IP of vcenter server, but importing the old vcenter DB, there are a few steps you will need to do to make sure the VSM SVS connection matches the new vcenter IP.

If you are trying to create an additional new vcenter in parallel, then you will have downtime problems as the port-profiles/network name programming that the guestVMs currently have will loose their 'backing' info if you try to migrate, as you will have to move NICs to standard or generic dVS before moving the hosts to the new vcenter.

If you are already on vcenter 6, I believe you can vmotion from one host to another and additionally change the vswitch/dVS/port profile being used.

Really need more detail about how are you migrating from one vcenter to the 6.0 VCA.

Thanks,

Kirk...