In this example vCenter Server will be deployed in a lab environment to an Intel NUC Bean Canyon running ESXi 7.0 U1C. To read about what’s new in vSphere 7 see vSphere 7 and vSAN 7 Headline New Features. vCenter Server then provides the single management pane for physical hosts and virtual machines, along with enterprise functionality like vMotion for live workload portability, High Availability for workload failover, and Distributed Resource Scheduler for automatically balancing resources. ESXi needs to be installed first on a physical machine to provide at least one host for the vCenter virtual appliance to be deployed to. You can track the latest releases and build numbers in this KB article.ĮSXi is the market leading hypervisor, able to abstract and pool compute resources across commodity hardware, and implement granular based controls and automation.
The current version at the time of writing is vSphere 7.0 Update 1c.
vSphere 7.0 was initially released in June 2020, and followed up with vSphere 7.0 Update 1 in October 2020.
To do so, click on summary in the Navigator menu and finally on the Reboot button on the top right.This opening post in a new lab series provides a walkthrough for installing the latest iteration of vSphere 7.0 bringing cloud-native workloads to the data centre with embedded Kubernetes and Tanzu. Once completed – it took me less than 4 minutes – you will be asked to reboot. The update will go through different stages: staging, running of pre-install scripts, updating. Now click on the “Install Updates” drop down menu and select “Install All Updates”
If the online repository is reachable and a new update is available, it will show up in the “Available Updates” section. Available patches can be either FP (Full Product patch – VMware and 3rd party fixes) and TP (Third Party patch – containing only fixes for 3rd party components, e.g. Then click on “Check Updates” in the top right corner and select “Check Repository”: In a Web browser, go to the vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface, which usually responds at this URL: and log in as root.Ĭlick on the Update button in the left hand Navigator menu: Let’s see how it is done, but before starting, take a snapshot of the VCSA VM.
Unless your PSC/vCenters are prevented to access the Internet, the repository option is the simplest and recommeded.
In my homelab I only have one VCSA with Embedded PSC, so the upgrade process was extremely simple, if you have an environment with external PSCs and multiple vCenters (typical in Enetrprise environments) you should first update your PSCs and only after your vCenters as per VMware’s official documentation.Īs with version 6.0, there are two ways to update the VCSA: using the Patches ISOs (offline update) or through the online repository. I tested it myself in the homelab taking advantage of the first maintenance release (6.5a) which was released last week bringing support to NSX 6.3. This was already made clear by VMware when in 2016 they released a tool to easily migrate a Windows vCenter 5.5 to VCSA 6.0 U2 and with vSphere 6.5 the migration from an older Windows vCenter server is one of the officially supported upgrade paths.Īlthough not new – it was inherited from v 6.0 – one of the best features of the VCSA 6.5 is it’s ease of upgrade. With the release of vSphere 6.5 there is really no reason anymore to stick with the old school Windows vCenter finally the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) has become a first class citizen and the preferred implementation solution for the most important vSphere infrastructure compnent.