Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)

So vSphere 6 launched last week and you want to kick the tires in your lab. Hopefully before you install you head on over to VMware and check out the Interoperability Matrixes. I’ve been reading posts online about folks jumping in with both feet and just straight out upgrading to vSphere 6. Of course I may have been one of those people myself.

I being who I am got all excited over the vSphere 6 release and all the new features it offers cracked open the upgrade guide and went all in with the vSphere 6 migration utility and migrated my vCenter 5.5 server to vCenter 6. That’s half the battle right. Get through the migration and everything will be golden. Not quiet. After the migration, (which went fairly smooth by the way) I launched the vSphere web client and went to login and noticed I was not able to login as myself. Luckily the administrator@vsphere.local account was able to login with no issues. I then started poking around and noticed I no longer had a link for Networking and Security.

After poking around a bit to try and figure out what was going I the light bulb went off on top my head and went on over to the Interoperability Matrixes and saw that it’s NSX 6.1.2 is not supported. Oh boy what am I going to do now. All my NSX services are still working, the NS manager seems to think it’s still linked to vCenter, I just can’t access any of the configuration elements because I need a supported version of the VAMI. The the greatest of news, but I figured I could live with it in the lab until the update comes out, right? Not really.

I want to upgrade my host to ESXi 6, but I can’t really do that either because the upgrade detects the unsupported modules and won’t allow the upgrade. Major bummer! Well major bummer if you don’t work for VMware, but of you do you can get a pre-release version of NSX 6.1.3 and you are off to the races. Once the update is released to the public you too will be off and running, but I have a little guidance for you.

Upgrade NSX to 6.1.3 before upgrading anything else. Upgrade the Manager Server and the Controllers. I have issues with trying to upgrade my hosts, which may have been caused by my over zealous upgrade without being prepared. I can’t be too sure at this point, so hopefully those of you that do this the right way won’t run in to the issue I have at this point. Because I couldn’t upgrade my hosts I created a custom ISO using Image Builder that includes:

VMware_bootbank_esx-vsip_6.x VMware_bootbank_esx-dvfilter-switch-security_6.x VMware_bootbank_esx-vxlan_6.x

The custom ISO allowed me to upgrade my hosts to vSphere 6 and get my NSX implementation back in working order. The short of this story is if you have NSX in your environment don’t attempt to upgrade until NSX 6.1.3 is released and you follow to proper upgrade process.