Upgrading vCenter 8 to vCenter 9: Fixing a Stage 2 Precheck DNS Resolution Error

I was doing an in-place vCenter upgrade from vCenter 8 to vCenter 9 using the VCSA 9 ISO. Stage 1 (deploying the new appliance) completed fine, but Stage 2 prechecks failed with a generic “internal error” in the installer UI. In this post I’ll show how I troubleshooted and solved it.

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Remove certificates with weak signature algorithms in vCenter Server

During the vCenter Server 8.0 upgrade, I was faced with the following Pre-upgrade check error and wasn’t able to continue the upgrade. As of vCenter Server 8.0, certificates with SHA-1 signature algorithms are no longer supported and must be removed or replaced with a certificate that uses SHA-2 signature algorithm. In this post, I’ll show…

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vCenter 6.7 U3 Upgrade Has Limited Deployment Size options with Snapshots

I encountered an interesting issue while attempting to upgrade a vCenter 6.5 Update 2 appliance to 6.7 Update 3. I started by mounting the 6.7U3 iso, executing the installer and selecting the upgrade option. The first step was to connect to the source vCenter appliance that I was upgrading and the vCenter that was managing…

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