VCF 9 is finally out, so the big question is, how do we upgrade our existing environment to take advantage of the new features

The upgrade for this is significantly more complicated than a vSphere 7 –> 8 upgrade normally is and we need to take care in the order we do things

There will also be three main upgrade scenarios

First is VCF 5.2 –> VCF 9, in this type of environment you will already have an SDDC Manager and the full VCF 5.2 stack deployed, this is arguably the simplest upgrade path

Second is where you have most of the VCF components, but never did a greenfield deployment with the cloud builder and so you dont have an SDDC Manager, but do have NSX, Aria Operations being optional

And lastly, you probably had vSphere Enterprise plus, so vCenter, ESX and maybe vSAN, and now have VCF in the new licensing world, need to upgrade to VCF 9 and want to take full advantage of everything on offer, this means there is a lot of new appliances will need to be added

This guide will be split into three sections covering each of these upgrade scenarios to help you find the path that best fits your environment for the upgrade
Section 4 is reserved for importing additional workload domains

All passwords must be 15 characters or more, the only allowed special characters are !@#$%^&*

There are some things to be aware of when upgrading, this list is not exhaustive but is the main points of concern, the full list can be found here

1. vCenters in ELM wont be supported for long term running, vCenters must be split, this is easier to do in vCenter 9 so I would upgrade to 9 then split the vCenter, this will need to be done before the convergence – more info here
2. VxRail is currently not supported for upgrade, as of 9.0.1
3. vCenter grouping replaces ELM giving the same functionality without all the ELM headaches, more info on setting that up can be found here for now with additional guides for that coming later
4. Clusters must be migrated to cluster images if using baselines before starting the upgrade, information can be found here, in section 8.1
5. vCenter must be hosted internally, mine wasnt, so a way to fix this is addressed in the vCenter upgrade
6. You will need to have your vCenter updated with the download token for your organisation, info on how to do this can be found here
7. Aria has been rebranded to VCF Operations, so we have VCF Operations, and VCF Operations For Logs
8. VCF Automation must have NSX clusters added in Policy Mode, Manager Mode will break the upgrade – more info will be shown in the VCF automation upgrade sections

Things of note with this release are

1. vCenter ELM is deprecated and will be removed
2. vCenter upgrade using the installer UI is deprecated
3. vSAN is no longer required for the management domain and VMFS can be used
4. vCLS is deprecated and will be put in retreat mode – covered in the post deployment steps section
5. Aria Operations For Logs has no upgrade path to VCF Ops For Logs, a new appliance will need to be installed and the config migrated manually, you can run the old in parallel, for log retention, or migrate the logs to VCF Ops For Logs, and if you have agents point them to the new log server
6. Aria LCM has no upgrade path and can be removed after the upgrade, it is replaced by the fleet management appliance
7. The Data Protection appliance, used for vSAN snapshots on the ESA architecture has been moved to the live recovery appliance, which is free, I am working on adding this documentation

As I ran into quite a few errors, rather than duplicating the fix, if it can be baked into the upgrade guide it is, anything that you may still encounter is summarised in Section 6 with the error code