Upgrading vSphere Replication from 6.5 to 8.2

I am working on a project of VMware Components upgrades, due to which most of future post will have “InterOperability, Backup and Upgrade” as the primary tone.

In this post, we are going to show the Supported upgrade procedure of vSphere Replication.
While doing my research i found many people have written about upgrade but using an unsupported procedure which is “Connecting the ISO file to the VR (vSphere Replication) VM and initiating upgrade from :5480 configuration page”

Which was not successful for me, had to move towards official documentation to take deeper look. The unsuccessful attempt looked like below screenshot.

Let’s Start with Officially documented procedure and some important points to remember:

Current version of VR -> 6.5.1
Target version of VR -> 8.2.0
Prerequisites are:
- Administrator Privilege is required for OVF deployment and connection refresh to vCenter
- Download the ISO image of VR 8.2 from VMware website
- Confirm the upgrade path.
- Connectivity of New VR VM to vCenter and Old VR VM
- Temporary IP for the New VR VM.
Protected site VR will be upgraded First and then the Recovery site will be upgraded

Lets Jump into the action now:

Step 1: Using the ISO image, start deploying a New VM with following file selected from ISO:

vSphere_Replication_OVF10.ovf
vSphere_Replication_support.vmdk
vSphere_Replication_system.vmdk

Steps 2: While Deploying VM on “Customize Template” page, add all the general information for the New VR VM like NTP address, domain name, New Temporary IP and hostname.
Power on the VM and wait for below shown screen.

Step 3: Select the upgrade tab and let it move towards connecting to old VR by asking for root credentials for it.

Step 4: SSO credential are needed to confirm the authentication and configuration with vCenter/PSC.

Step 5: observe the action performed in upgrade stage.
New VR will connect to old VR, migrate all the configuration to the NEW VR.
New VR will refresh the connection with vCenter
Power off the old VR and can be deleted as per company policy of cool off period.

Step 6: Perform the same steps from 1 to 5 on the secondary site as well.

Verification:

Login to VR configuration page using https://IP_Address:5480 and under System -> Information, we can confirm the version.

2. Old VM must be powered off and New VM is using the VR IP and temporary IP is gone.

End Result successful confirmed.

Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Samesh Dhankhar
VCIX – DCV & NV

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Samesh Dhankhar

Samesh Dhankhar is Virtualization Solution Architect with one of the biggest Cloud Service Provider in UAE region and has more than 10 years of experience specially with VMware Products.

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