So you’ve downloaded all the new VMWare 5.5 goodies and you want to upgrade your vCSA install to v5.5 – this is a little more involved than you may think, however it is very much worth the effort:
In vSphere 5.5, the vCenter Server Appliance limitations have been extremely raised when using the embedded database: Previous to vSphere 5.5, the limits were: * 5 vSphere Hosts * 50 Virtual Machines With vSphere 5.5, the limits are now:
- 400 vSphere Hosts
- 4000 Virtual Machines
- Referenced article: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2057376 Original reports denoted 500 vSphere Hosts and 5000 Virtual Machines. A tweet from Duncan Epping mentioned a 100/3000 limit Also Justin King a 100/3000 limit, In short the vCenter Server Appliance now has the horsepower to run in many, if not most vSphere Environments – even in the Fed space.
And if that wasn’t enough incentive there are
all the updates that are included in vSphere Web Client (a total overview with this quick reference is good to look at): * Console is now HTML5 * Web Client is now completely platform agnostic – Mac OSX FTW! * SSO greatly improved * Recently visited & created objects * vSphere Inventory Navigator History * Deploy vCenter Operations from vSphere Web Client Alright so now that we’re all psyched to upgrade to vCSA 5.5, lets get to it (
very useful KB article)! Download the vCSA 5.5 .ova Deploy this to your cluster/host/whatever (with all default settings). (File -> Deploy OVF Template) 
Goto the IP address of your newly deployed vcsa instance and Accept the EULA, click Next, select Upgrade from previous version. 
Copy the key from the new appliance, into the Upgrade section of the old appliance and click Import remote key. Copy the upgrade key out of the old appliance and paste it into the Paste source appliance key section and click Next. Check replace SSL certificates. 
Add the password for the new vcsa appliance and continue through all the prompts, view the list of hosts presented by the vcsa appliance and ensure the ones you want that vcsa instance to manage are checked. Make sure you’ve backed up or snapshotted your vcsa instance and continue through the pre-upgrade checker then click upgrade. 
The new appliance shuts down the old appliance and assumes the network identity of the old appliance. If the old appliance was configured to use dynamic addressing, the new appliance will also use dynamic addressing. When the import is complete, the new vCenter Server Appliance starts. 
Click close and the vcsa appliance will reboot. You’re done – your new vcsa appliance has taken the network identity on of the old one and all it’s parameters (you may need to confirm some SSL cert changes for the likes of VUM, vSphere Desktop Client etc). 
Thanks a lot!
I followed your article and it worked great. Thanks
I have a vCSA 5.0 as source.
Will the import work as well or do I have to do it in some more steps?
And I’d like the data disk to be thin provisioned – do I have to use the iso image to upgrade?
This should work with vCSA 5.0 as well – maybe try running the above procedure to do 5.0 -> 5.1 then again for 5.1 -> 5.5.
I have found the best way to upgrade is with the OVA image, but if you wish you can provision it with an ISO and build a custom VM with a thin disk if you wish.
The actual limits for the vCA is based on if you are using the embedded vPostgress database or not. The numbers are as follow:
Embedded vPostgress: 100 hosts and 3000 VMs
External Oracle DB: 1,000 hosts and 10,000 VMs.
You can check my post at: http://www.virtualizationteam.com/server-virtualization/vcenter-server-appliance-5-5-limitations.html for more info on these numbers :)
I did my VMWare ICM 5.5 course last month, the trainers perspective (as well as ours) was that yeah Postreges is only “supported” to handle that many but in reality, it is used in production environments far larger.