Upgrading your vSphere Site Recovery Manager

vSphere 5.5 going end of life in September 2018, we have been traveling all over doing workshops for upgrading to vSphere 6.x. However, with each workshop we have at least one customer who is running Site Recovery Manager with their vCenter Server 5.5 and aren’t too sure what the upgrade path is. This blog will go over the steps I took to upgrade a vSphere 5.5 U3 environment which runs Site Recovery Manager 5.8.1 and vSphere Replication 5.8.1 to a vSphere 6.5 U1 environment which runs Site Recovery Manager 8.1 and vSphere Replication 8.1.

Preparing for your Upgrade

As we review the Interoperability Matrices for vCenter Server and Site Recovery Manager we can see there is no direct upgrade path from vCenter Server 5.5 U3 with Site Recovery Manager 5.8.1 to vCenter Server 6.5 or 6.7. Luckily Site Recovery Manager version 8.1 was released which helps alleviate some of the issues. Site Recovery Manager 8.1 introduced compatibility with vCenter Server 6.0 U3, 6.5, and 6.7. Along with the Interoperability Matrices we highly recommend reviewing the release notes, product documentation, and the update sequence guides for 6.0 and 6.5 as this will layout the recommended paths to upgrade the compatible VMware products.

Site Recovery Manager Upgrade Paths

there is no direct upgrade from vCenter Server 5.5U3 and Site Recovery Manager 5.8.1 to vCenter Server 6.5 and Site Recovery Manager 5.8.1. We do have a few supported methods that we can use. These methods would depend on your own environmental requirements. During your upgrade, your environment may also include a hardware refresh, because of these you may have opted to deploy a new vCenter Server and Site Recovery Manager environment and opted to do a parallel migration.

Another possibility is that you may also have a simple or small Site Recovery Manager deployment, and you choose to do more of a forklift upgrade. With this method, you would uninstall Site Recovery Manager from your vSphere 5.5 environment and then upgrade directly to vSphere 6.5. Once your environment is fully upgraded you can then deploy a fresh installation of Site Recovery Manager 8.1.

As we review the Site Recovery Manager  6.0 documentation we can see that we have the following upgrade note. This means if we are on a version previous to 5.8.x we must first update.

Upgrading from Site Recovery Manager 5.0.x and 5.1.x to Site Recovery Manager 6.0 is not supported. Upgrade Site Recovery Manager 5.0.x and 5.1.x to a Site Recovery Manager 5.5.x or 5.8.x release before you upgrade to Site Recovery Manager 6.0.

When we review the Site Recovery Manager  6.1 documentation we can see that we have a new warning.

Upgrading from Site Recovery Manager 5.x to Site Recovery Manager 6.1 is not supported. Upgrade Site Recovery Manager 5.x to a Site Recovery Manager 6.0.x release before you upgrade to Site Recovery Manager 6.1.

And then last but not least when we review the Site Recovery Manager  8.1 documentation we can see

Upgrading from Site Recovery Manager 6.0.x to Site Recovery Manager 8.1 is not supported. Upgrade Site Recovery Manager to a Site Recovery Manager 6.1.x release before you upgrade to Site Recovery Manager 8.1.

When we put this all together we can see our upgrade path, we will upgrade Site Recovery Manager in the following order. 5.8.1 -> 6.0, 6.0 -> 6.1.2.1 and then 6.1.2.1 -> 8.1.

Site Recovery Manager - Site Recovery Manager Plugins moved from C# Client to vSphere Web Client (Flash)

I hope this has been informative and thank you for reading!