Upgrading VCSA 6.5 to 6.5U1

Make sure you know the order for upgrading the vCenter Appliance.

If you are unfamiliar with the upgrade process, then VMware has been so kind to give us a chart.
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2147289

But the biggest gotcha to point out here is you have any PSC (Platform Services Controller) or SSO external appliances, these MUST be upgraded first. Do not get burned here and mess up your entire environment.

The entire upgrade took about 45 minutes where there were 2 geographical data centers with 2 linked instances of VCSA and 1 PSC.

I suggest using the web portal for the entire upgrade process [https://your_vcsa_or_psc:5480]

I did a full backup of the 2 VCSAs and PSC. I also took a snapshot for good measure. Took a few minutes for the download of the updates. After the updates are complete, you will notice your inability to manage anything through that VCSA. The VCSA will not reboot on its own.

Once the VCSA is rebooted, you may notice unknown health status when you login. This is caused by your browser cache so don't be alarmed. Just clear your cache and you should see all greens.

All in all, this was not a bad upgrade at all. Just make sure you take a look at the upgrade sequence as to not be up all night trying to unfubar your environment!!!

If you receive vSphere HA host status errors from any of the hosts after the upgrade, then it may be necessary to disable HA at the cluster level, then re-enable HA. You can follow several different forums for removing affected vibs or uninstalling the FDM agent. But ultimately, the fix for us was to disable/enable HA at the cluster.

If you are using other things like Site Recovery Manager or vSphere Replication, then make sure you upgrade those as well in the proper order. When upgrading the vSphere Replication appliance, make sure to shut the appliances down, then power them back on. This will ensure that any configuration changes that occurred during the upgrade are propagated to the appliance.  Once your vSphere Replication servers are upgraded, perform the upgrade on your SRM servers. The biggest thing to remember in the upgrade process is to not make any changes especially to the objects identified within VCSA. If you make this mistake, then you will have to remove the installations from VCSA. I once made the mistake of renaming my vSphere Replication name. This messed up SRM completely. I had to redo the installation in order to get it working again.

Well it's been real folks!!! Until next time!!!