Upgrading your vCenter to 8.0u1b and hit a snag? Fall back to VAMI and you'll be all good.
If you’re using vCenter to go through the vCenter update I bet you ran into a snag. The workflow in vCenter takes you through selecting the target version, 8.0.1.00200. Then verifying you have a backup by asking you. Then the third step is Prepare source – vCenter Life-Cycle Manager.
Now you get a red error and no clear way of resolving the upgrade path.
For the selected target version, use GUI installer or CLI to proceed with upgrade and vCenter Server Management Interface for update.
The vCenter Server Life-cycle Manager plugin needs to be updated to the latest version in order to orchestrate properly the update process. After the plugin is updated, the UI will reload automatically.
What this is not very clearly telling you is that you need to use the GUI installer – which is another way of saying use the VMware Appliance Management Interface (VAMI) of vCenter that has the upgrade GUI built in. Because you’re currently IN vCenter and this specific update requires the latest version of vCenter Server Life-cycle manager to update vCenter.
You can get to your vCenter’s VAMI at https://<vcenter FQDN or IP>:5480 and use your administrator@vsphere.local SSO account or the root account that was setup when vCenter was deployed to log in.
Once you’re in the VAMI, just click on the Update option in the left column, and go through the process of upgrading your vCenter.
It’s an interesting speed bump but the upgrade should go pretty smooth after this.
