Step-by-Step Guide: Upgrading vSphere 7 to 8

The support clock is ticking toward October 2, 2025—the official end-of-life date for vSphere 7.

If you still haven’t upgraded your vCenters yet, i hope you find this blog helpful in your journey.

vSphere 8 also brings many features improvements such as —

Distributed Services Engine (DPU Offload), Accelerated GPU Capabilities, Native Kubernetes Integration, Enhanced Life-cycle & Cluster Management, Advanced DRS & vMotion, vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA), vNUMA GUI Visualization & Security Enhancements.

You can read more about these in details here.

📊 Assessment & Planning

🔍 Compatibility Checks

• Verify hardware (servers, NICs, storage) on VMware HCL (now Broadcom compatibility guide)

• Confirm interoperability of other VMware products like NSX datacenter, VMware Cloud Director, plugins etc using VMware Product Interoperability Matrix

• Validate third-party tools and backup/DR systems.

• Decide on the target build number of the vcenter server & the esxi hosts for your environment

  • In my environment, i decided to going with Vcenter 8U3e & esxi 8U3d

🔼 Upgrade Sequence

• If you need to update multiple products in your environment, start with updating the product with the lowest sequence number from the table below.

• If a product is not present in your environment, update the subsequent product.

• If a product is managed by vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager, the minimum version may be dictated by vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager.

• If upgrading from vSphere 6.7 with NSX, NVDS to CVDS migration is required. To migrate from NVDS to CVDS, you must first upgrade to vSphere 7.0 Update 2 or higher along with NSX 3.1.x or higher.

Refer this KB Article for more details.

⚙️ Mandatory Pre-checks

• Upgrading to vCenter Server 8.0 requires an additional pre-check for certificates with weak signature algorithms

  • The pre-check script from vmware ensures that vCenter Server is not using certificates with weak signature algorithms

• Verify and resolve any expired vCenter Server certificates

  • The vCert tool from vmware can be used to ease the management capability for most vCenter Server certificate-related operations

• Use the VCF Diagnostic Tool for vSphere (VDT) directly on a vCenter Server appliance.to execute a series of checks on the system configuration and reports user-friendly PASS/FAIL/WARN results for known configuration issues

🚦 Running the pre-checks

I have copied the VDT tool & pre-check script (vsphere8_upgrade_certificate_checks) & the vCert tool to the vcenter appliance using SCP at /tmp/vcenter_8_upgrade_checks

✅ Running vsphere8_upgrade_certificate_checks.py

✅ Running VDT tool

The tool will generate a PASS/FAIL/WARN report on screen. it will also store the reports & VDT logs at /var/log/vmware/vdt/

In My environment, i received 2 FAIL

🛑 VMDIR Domain functional level

• I first validated the Domain level using : usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/dir-cli domain-functional-level get

• vCenter that has been upgraded since version 6.5 will have a DFL of 1.

• For vCenter version 7 and above, the domain level should be 4

• To fix this i followed this vmware KB article and used the below command

• Ensure that you have a snapshot before proceeding

$ /usr/lib/vmware-vmafd/bin/dir-cli domain-functional-level set --level 4 --login Administrator@vsphere.local --domain-name vsphere.local

$ service-control --restart vmdird

🛑 One of the Certificate in the trusted root is not a Certificate authority

• I fixed this by removing cert from VMware directory using the vCert tool

• Ensure that you have a snapshot before proceeding

• I re-run the VDT tool to validate if the issues are fixed & are passed

• Rebooted the vcenter to make sure there are no issues after the changes

🚀🔁 Upgrade Procedure

📋 preparations

• Temporary IP for the upgrade process

  • The upgrade installer deploys a new vCenter 8 appliance alongside the old one. A temporary IP lets the installer access and configure it without disrupting existing services

  • After data migration, the new appliance shuts down the old one and adopts its original IP

  • Ensure the temporary IP belongs in the same VLAN/subnet as the existing vCenter and is reachable on ports 443 & 5480 from the system running the vCenter installer.

• For upgrading vCenter in a High Availability Environment, remove vCenter HA

• Reboot 🔁 the vCenter to make sure there are no pending reboot. verify the services are all up using service-control --status --all

• Backup 💾 - Make sure to take file based backup from VAMI (https://<vcenter>:5480)

  

  Confirm that the backup is successful

  

• Snapshot 📸 of the vCenter appliance VM.

  If the vCenter is part of an Enhanced Linked Mode (ELM) , all vCenters in ELM must be powered off simultaneously*. Snapshots should be taken only after all vCenters are fully powered off.*

  

• If the vCenter resides on a cluster with DRS set to Fully Automated, change the DRS mode to Partially Automated or Manual to prevent automatic load balancing during the upgrade.

  

🏁 Start Upgrade

📀 Mount the vCenter 8 appliance ISO & start the installer

🧭 Stage 1: Deployment

During Stage 1, the installer deploys a new vCenter 8 appliance alongside the old one. The temporary IP is assigned to it, and the installer will prepare/configure the vcenter services services.

• Choose the upgrade option

• Provide the connection details of the vCenter you want to upgrade, along with the credentials for the vCenter or ESXi host where the existing vCenter appliance is currently registered and managed.

• Specify the target vCenter where you want to deploy the new vCenter 8 appliance.

• Specify the vm name & credentials for the new appliance

• Choose the deployment size

• Review all the information & hit FINISH

🧭 Stage 2: Data Migration

Once stage 1 is completed, the installer will connect to https://<temporary_ip>:5480 to continue with the stage 2

• Pre-upgrade check being run

• If any errors are encountered, they must be resolved before proceeding.

• Warnings should be reviewed to determine their impact or necessity for action, and addressed accordingly before moving forward.

• Choose the appropriate data set that you need to copy over

• Review all the information and hit FINISH

• This begins the data copy process. Once the data is copied, the source vCenter appliance will be shut down automatically.

• The vCenter 8 appliance will come up with the original IP

✅ Verification

• Verify all vCenter services are up

• You can re-run the VDT tool to verify if all tests passes. This can help identify any post upgrade issues

• Verify in the vCenter web UI that all inventory data, configurations, and permissions have been correctly migrated.

• Ensure that the new vCenter Server 8.0 is functioning as expected.

• Check for any visible errors in the events section.

• Verify that any plugins are re-deployed.

• Check that all hosts are healthy and connected.

• Ensure DRS and vMotion work as expected.

• Check if the vSAN, NFS, and VMFS datastores are connected to the hosts.

• Check in NSX Manager to ensure the cluster shows as healthy and NSX does not report any issues related to this vCenter.

• Verify that other VMware services, like VMware Cloud Director, can connect successfully to the vCenter.

Now we can move on to the next step to upgrade the esxi hosts to ver. 8