VMware vCenter and ESXi 6 Upgrade

Upgrading from VMware vCenter and ESXi 5.1 to 6.0

I recently upgraded our VMware vCenter and ESXI  straight from version 5.1 to 6, skipping 5.5.  VMware have made this a very simple and seamless in-place upgrade and it went pretty much without a hitch.

vCenter Upgrade

First of all, I upgraded my vCenter server so that my ESXi servers would still be managed by it before I upgraded them.  This installation took about an hour to do and the only issue of note related to my SQL server.  The installation and all of the scripts ran fine but the next morning the VMware VirtualCenter Server service was stopped and not starting.  I checked the log folder and opened the most recent vpxnnn.log file in c:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\logs\vmware-vpx

I found this message:

• warning vpxd[04720] [Originator@6876 sub=Default] [VdbStatement] Statement diagnostic data from driver is 42000:0:9002:[Microsoft][SQL Server Native Client 10.0][SQL Server]The transaction log for database 'Vsphere5' is full. To find out why space in the log cannot be reused, see the log_reuse_wait_desc column in sys.databases

I checked my SQL Server and the transaction log for this database had grown to over 5Gb in size.  I backed up the log, truncated it, did a shrink on the log file and that sorted it out for me.
The reason that my SQL transaction log had this problem was that I have a scheduled job to backup the log once a day - at about midday.  This is usually fine for day to day operations.  The upgrade must have made a significant amount of changes to the database and the transaction log grew to the point that it filled up.

ESXi Upgrade

After my vCenter server was upgraded, I now had to upgrade the individual ESXi servers.  The main problem that I envisaged was installing drivers for my fibre (FC) HBAs.  I had a little bit of difficulty locating them when I was installing ESXi 5.1.  They were new then, but the ESXi 6 installation would probably have them bundled with it.  It was great to see that there is now an upgrade option and I didn't have to do a fresh install.

The ESXi upgrade took about 20 minutes per server and went without a hitch.

Overall, based on my experience, the only thing that I would warn about is keeping an eye on your SQL transaction log.

In upcoming, related, posts I will be talking about how to shrink a SQL Server transaction log that doesn't want to shrink and installing Brocade HBAs on a ESXi 5 system.