5.5

Table Of Contents
Upgrade the components on the protected site before you upgrade the components on the recovery site.
Upgrading the protected site first allows you to perform a disaster recovery on the recovery site if you
encounter problems during the upgrade that render the protected site unusable. The exception is the ESXi
hosts, which you can upgrade after you finish upgrading the other components on the protected and
recovery sites.
IMPORTANT If you configured bidirectional protection, in which each site acts as the recovery site for the
virtual machines on the other site, upgrade the most critical of the sites first.
1 Upgrade vCenter Server on the protected site.
2 Upgrade SRM Server on the protected site.
3 Upgrade the storage replication adapters (SRA) on the protected site.
4 Upgrade the vSphere Replication appliance on the protected site.
5 Upgrade any additional vSphere Replication server instances on the protected site.
6 Upgrade vCenter Server on the recovery site.
7 Upgrade SRM Server on the recovery site.
8 Upgrade the storage replication adapters (SRA) on the recovery site.
9 Upgrade the vSphere Replication appliance on the recovery site.
10 Upgrade any additional vSphere Replication server instances on the recovery site.
11 Configure the connection between the SRM sites and vSphere Replication appliances.
12 Verify that your protection groups and recovery plans are still valid.
13 Upgrade ESXi Server on the recovery site.
14 Upgrade ESXi Server on the protected site.
15 Upgrade the virtual hardware and VMware Tools on the virtual machines on the ESXi hosts.
Upgrade SRM
You perform several tasks to upgrade SRM.
You must perform the upgrade tasks in order. Complete all of the upgrade tasks on the protected site first,
then complete the tasks on the recovery site.
Prerequisites
You must upgrade versions of SRM earlier than 5.0 to SRM 5.0 or 5.0.1 before you can upgrade to SRM 5.5.
IMPORTANT Upgrading vCenter Server directly from 4.1.x to 5.5 is a supported upgrade path. However,
upgrading SRM directly from 4.1.x to 5.5 is not a supported upgrade path. When upgrading a
vCenter Server 4.1.x instance that includes an SRM installation, you must upgrade vCenter Server to version
5.0.x before you upgrade SRM to 5.0 or 5.0.1. If you upgrade vCenter Server from 4.1.x to 5.5 directly, when
you attempt to upgrade SRM from 4.1.x to 5.0 or 5.0.1, the SRM upgrade fails. SRM 5.0.x cannot connect to a
vCenter Server 5.5 instance.
Procedure
1 Prepare for SRM Upgrade on page 42
Before you can upgrade SRM, you must perform preparatory tasks.
2 Upgrade the SRM Server Without Migration on page 42
You can upgrade the SRM Server on the same host as an existing SRM Server installation.
Chapter 6 Upgrading SRM
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