Setup guide

TECHNICAL WHITE PAPER / 6
VMware vSphere® 5.0 Upgrade
Best Practices
Requirements
The following requirements for vCenter 5.0 are listed. These are supported minimums. Scaling and sizing of
vCenter Server and components should be based on the size of the current virtual environment and anticipated
growth.
•Processor:TwoCPUs2.0GHzorhigherIntelorAMDx86processors,withprocessorrequirementshigherifthe
database runs on the same machine
•Memory:4GBRAM,withRAMrequirementshigherifyourdatabaserunsonthesamemachine
•Diskstorage:4GB,withdiskrequirementshigherifyourdatabaserunsonthesamemachine
•Networking:1Gbrecommended
•OS:64-bit
•Supporteddatabaseplatform
Upgrade Process
The following diagram depicts possible upgrade scenarios. As shown, the type of architecture used, 32-bit OS
versus 64-bit OS, dictates the amount of eort required for the upgrade.
vCenter 4.1/
vCenter 4.0
64-bit
Local database
Database migration
not required
Proceed to upgrade
vCenter and
convert database
Proceed to upgrade
vCenter and
convert database
Migrate database and then
proceed to upgrade vCenter
and convert database
Migrate database and then
proceed to upgrade vCenter
and convert database
Replace hardware OS and
then proceed to upgrade
vCenter and convert database
Database migration
required
Database migration
not required
Database migration
required
Remote database
32-bit
1
Verify vCenter
Version
2
Verify vCenter
Hardware and OS
3
vCenter Databases
Location
4
vCenter Databases
Migration
5
Upgrade Path
NOTE: With the release of vSphere 5.0, vCenter Server is also oered as a Linux-based appliance, referred to as
the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), which can be deployed in minutes. Due to the architectural dierences
between the installable vCenter and the new VCSA, there is no migration path or database conversion tool to
migrate to the VCSA. You must deploy a new VCSA and attach all the infrastructure components before
recreating and attaching inventory objects.
In this white paper, we will explore the three most common scenarios:
•vCenter4.0andUpgradeManager4.0,anda32-bitOSwithalocaldatabase
•vCenter4.1andUpgradeManager4.1,a64-bitOSwithalocaldatabase,andtherequirementtomigratetoa
remote database
•vCenter4.1,a64-bitOSwitharemotedatabase,andaseparateUpgradeManagerserver
Before we explore these scenarios, we will first describe how to safely secure your current vCenter Server
configuration.