vSphere 7 Upgrade Best Practices

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi
• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

This article provides important documentation and upgrade information that must be reviewed before upgrading to vSphere 7.0.

Resolution

Upgrade Considerations while Upgrading to vSphere 7:

Caution:

• Review Important information before upgrading to vSphere 7.0
• If your environment is distributed across multiple machines, the upgrades must be done sequentially, not concurrently.
• Upgrades to vSphere 7.0 are only possible from vSphere 6.5 or vSphere 6.7
• In vSphere 7.0, vCenter Server will not support managing the following.
  • ESXi hosts running vSphere 6.0 or lower   
  • Distributed Virtual Switches running on version 6.0 or lower
  • Host profiles based off an ESXi host running vSphere 6.0 or lower
  • In vSphere 7.0, vCenter Server for Windows has been removed and support is not available. 
  • In vSphere 7.0, External Platform Services Controllers are removed. 
• In vSphere 7.0, TLS 1.2 is enabled by default. TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 are disabled by default.
• In vSphere 7.0, the Flash-based vSphere Web Client has been deprecated and is no longer available.
• If the vCenter is currently participating in vCenter High Availability (VCHA), it must meet the prerequisites outlined in Prerequisites for Upgrading vCenter Server High Availability Environments before upgrading. Alternatively, it can be disabled first and re-enabled after the upgrade.

ESXi 7 Upgrade Best Practices:

• Review the vSphere 7.0 Release notes for compatibility and known issues
• Devices deprecated and unsupported in ESXi 7.0
• New Kernel options available on ESXi 7.0
• For hardware compatibility running ESXi, see the VMware Compatibility Guide
• Determine if any ESXi 6.5 or 6.7 hosts are using drivers mentioned in vmkapi Dependency error while Installing/upgrading to ESXi 7.0 before upgrading them to ESXi 7.0
• The default settings for Forged Transmits and MAC address changes have changed between vSphere 6.x and 7.0 releases. This might cause migration pre-check failures while upgrading a cluster of hosts to ESXi 7.0. Ensure the 6.x hosts will have consistent security policies to the upgraded 7.0 hosts to prevent this.

vCenter Server 7 Upgrade Best Practices:

• Review the Update sequence for vSphere 7.0 and its compatible VMware products to plan the proper order of your vSphere solutions
• Review the VMware Product Interoperability Matrices to ensure other solutions will support your upgrade path.
• Ensure all DNS forward/reverse resolution is successful between the Platform Services Controllers, vCenter Servers, ESXi hosts and the virtual machines involved in your upgrade.
• Ensure that NTP is configured correctly across all nodes involved in your vSphere upgrade.
• Before upgrading, powered-off concurrent snapshots are recommended for all vCenter Servers and Platform Services Controllers within the Single Sign-On domain to prevent replication sync issues
  • If a rollback to snapshot is necessary, all PSC and vCenter Servers should be reverted to the previous state.
• When upgrading vCenter Server Appliance from 6.7 U2c or 6.7 U3 to vCenter Server 7.0, you must disable TSO (TCP Segmentation Offload) and GSO (Generic Segmentation Offload) on the appliance Ethernet Adapter Configuration first .  
• If you are upgrading from an external PSC deployment, extra steps need to be taken after the upgrade completes:
  • Re-point any external solutions that originally used the Platform Services Controller address as a direct endpoint. (i.e. VMware NSX)
  • Using the cmsso command to unregister vCenter or PSC from Single Sign-On . Ensure no other vCenters are using a PSC before decommissioning it!
• If you are upgrading from a load balanced PSC deployment, please see Upgrading to vCenter 7.0 from vCenter 6.x with Load Balanced PSCs (78446)
• When upgrading several vCenter Servers with external Platform Services Controllers, replication partnerships are specified between the newly embedded vCenters during the upgrade configuration. These agreements should be from a consecutive ring topology. In the case of 3 or more vCenter Servers, the very last agreement is created between the first and last updated vCenter with the vdcrepadmin createagreement command.

/usr/lib/vmware-vmdir/bin/vdcrepadmin -f createagreement -2 -h <FIRST_UPGRADED_VC> -H <LAST_UPGRADED_VC> -u administrator
 

Important Information about vSphere 7.0

• For known issues and supportability notices, see vSphere 7.0 Release Notes
• For upgrading vCenter Server, see  vCenter Server Upgrade guide
• For vCenter Server appliance requirements, see System Requirements for the vCenter Server Appliance  

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