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Table Of Contents
CLI Upgrade of the vCenter Server Appliance and
Platform Services Controller Appliance
You can use the CLI installer to perform an unattended upgrade of a vCenter Server Appliance or
Platform Services Controller appliance on an ESXi host or vCenter Server instance.
The CLI upgrade process includes downloading the vCenter Server Appliance installer on a network
virtual machine or physical server from which you want to perform the upgrade, preparing a JSON
configuration file with the upgrade information, and running the upgrade command.
Important The user name that you use to log in to the machine from which you want to run the CLI
upgrade, the path to the vCenter Server Appliance ISO file, the path to your JSON configuration file, and
the string values in your JSON configuration file, including the passwords, must contain only ASCII
characters. Extended ASCII and non-ASCII characters are unsupported.
The vCenter Server Appliance ISO file contains templates of JSON files that contain the minimum
configuration parameters that are required for upgrading a vCenter Server Appliance or
Platform Services Controller appliance. For information about preparing JSON templates for CLI upgrade
of the vCenter Server Appliance and Platform Services Controller appliance, see Prepare Your JSON
Configuration File for CLI Upgrade.
Important For topologies with external Platform Services Controller instances, you must upgrade the
replicating Platform Services Controller instances in a sequence. After the successful upgrade of all
Platform Services Controller instances in the domain, you can perform concurrent upgrades of multiple
vCenter Server appliances that point to a common external Platform Services Controller instance.
Prepare Your JSON Configuration File for CLI Upgrade
Before you run the CLI command to upgrade a vCenter Server Appliance or Platform Services Controller
appliance, you must prepare a JSON file with configuration parameters and their values for your upgrade
specification.
The vCenter Server Appliance installer contains JSON templates for all upgrade types. For information
about the templates, see JSON Templates for CLI Upgrade of the vCenter Server Appliance and Platform
Services Controller Appliance.
You can upgrade an appliance with minimum configurations by setting values to the configuration
parameters in the JSON template for your specification. You can edit the preset values, remove
configuration parameters, and add configuration parameters for custom configurations.
For a complete list of the configuration parameters and their descriptions, navigate to the installer
subdirectory for your operating system and run the vcsa-deploy upgrade --template-help command
or see Upgrade Configuration Parameters.
Prerequisites
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You must be familiar with the JSON syntax.
vCenter Server Upgrade
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