vCenter upgrade + ephemeral ports

[FerdinandG]

Hi,

I'm planning an upgrade of a VCSA 6.7 to version 7.0. I dug through pretty much all the documentation but I am still a bit unsure about the use of ephemeral ports & vCenter. The documentation says:

If you are deploying the vCenter Server appliance directly on an ESXi host, non-ephemeral distributed virtual port groups are not supported and are not shown. After the upgrade, you can manually connect the appliance to the original non-ephemeral distributed virtual port group. This is not a limitation when deploying the appliance through a vCenter Server, and you can deploy to ephemeral or non-ephemeral distributed virtual port groups.

I'm not quite certain what to make of this. Is it better to put vCenter on an ephemeral vDS portgroup at least during the upgrade to ensure connectivity all the time?

The person I "inherited" this installation from put all mgmt ports including vCenter on port groups with static bindings. But from what I learned from the documentation this seems to be a bad idea. At least there's one (a bit scary) KB article that explains how to restore vCenter connectivity by creating a standard vSwitch using the CLI (https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/83906) which I naturally want to avoid.

So, would it be wiser to put vCenter on an ephemeral port group before the upgrade (or maybe even leave it there permanently)?

Also, from what I understand, VM operation should not be interrupted by vCenter upgrade, *except* changing port assignments or starting VMs which are on static port groups. Is this correct?

TIA!

Ferdinand

[Kinnison]

Hello,

Comment edited to remove its content as it no longer serves the context of this discussion.

Regards.

[MarkHargreaves · Accepted solution]

The note you are looking at is in regard to the VCSA appliance that will get deployed during the upgrade process.  You do not need to change the port group on the source vCenter.  The upgrade does not upgrade the source appliance, it deploys a new appliance and migrates the config from the source appliance to the new destination appliance and then powers down the source vCenter.  This is a two stage process that the wizard will walk you through.

Once you get to the network configuration page of the VCSA upgrade wizard, only vds ephemeral port groups will be able to be selected for the deployment of the VCSA appliance.  If you are not using a vds in your environment, you don't need to be concerned with ephemeral port groups on a standard switch since ephemeral port groups are not supported on standard switches.  So, this will work without issue and you just need to be sure you are on the correct standard switch port group.

If you are on vds and have not done so, I would create a new port group with the same vlan that your source vcenter is living on, set the binding to ephemeral, and call it something like vCenter-ephemeral.  This will make it easy to identify when you are selecting the port group in the VCSA upgrade wizard.

From a production standpoint, I prefer to keep the vCenter on an ephemeral port group as it will make recovery of vCenter much easier.

All workloads should continue to run through this upgrade process.  I would avoid changing port assignments or VM start/stop/restart actions until the upgrade is complete.

I hope some of this helps.