vSphere 6.5 first introduced vCenter HA and since its inception has been deployed in many environments. When it comes to upgrading or updating your vCenter HA environment there are some specific considerations. If you have wondered what it takes to handle the lifecycle of a vCenter HA enabled vCenter Server, keep reading! vCenter HA Overview vCenter HA has seen wide adoption as customers wish to provide provide high availability for their vCenter Server.

vSphere 6.5U1 was released on July 27th. This is an incremental update a lot of people wait for before upgrading from a previous version. I have been lucky to have been running on vSphere 6.5 for quite some time and have been enjoying it very much. Obviously we never upgrade production first, if we can help it. I decided to attempt an upgrade on one of our QA vCenters that was deployed using the VCHA Advanced workflow.

Warning: A few others and myself have noticed that when updating a VCHA Cluster to 6.5U1 it resets the hostname to localhost.localdomain stopping vCenter Web Client from Loading. It seems to be isolated to Advanced Deployments and not Basic. I would recommend destroying your VCHA Cluster, updating, then redeploying in this scenario. Warning2: It also seems that if you try to redeploy VCHA Advanced after an upgrade, it still resets the hostname, I have a case opened and will update here as neccessary.

One of my favorite new features of vSphere 6.5 is definately vCenter HA. I was checking out alerts when I noticed i had an alarm for vCenter HA being degraded. Looking through the GUI, I was unable to find anything in regards to why the Health was a warning and why the components would not sync. Then I remembered a previous case I had opened for VCHA. There is a log file located in /var/log/vmware/vcha

So as everyone has probably seen, vSphere 6.5 is now GA. One of the features i have been waiting for the most is vCenter HA. I have spent some time trying to get this working in my lab. Unfortunately after countless tries i was stuck. Thanks to folks in the vExpert Slack for helping me try to resolve this, but unfortunately this was a case for VMware Support. Every time I would try to configure vCenter HA using the Advanced Wizard, I would get the following error.