As of VMware 6.7 the external PSC has been announced as depreciated. The last version that supports an External PSC is 6.7. As more and more organizations are planning the move to 7.0 and beyond. Converging the PSC will be important. As this is not a regular task of a VMware admin, I wanted to share some lessons learned from my experience.

As I teased in a previous post, I had issues with the process. Some tips that could help your process go smoothly.

in the vSphere web UI, their is an option (Administration>System Configuration) to converge the PSC. This is a great option to perform this task. Make sure you have the vCEnter admin username and password as well as AD credentials to authenticate your Domain.(if your setup uses it). You may experience an issue where the pre-check will give you an error as below.

You may find an option to re-point the VAMI update URL to a manual URL. In my experience this created issues. My recommended solutions is to find the ISO of the EXACT version of your current vCenter. Download this ISO from my VMware portal. Upload this to a local data-store, and mount it to your vCenter VM. You should login to the DCUI or SSH into the host and run the below command to mount the ISO.

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom

Now you should be able to go back to the vCenter UI and rerun the check. The process should run smoothly. You should monitor the process via a SSH or DCUI by running a tail command.

sudo tail -f /var/log/vmware/converge/converge.log

Once the process completed. Log back into the vCenter UI. Confirm that the Converge has happened, and then decommission the external PSC.

Hopefully with this info, you can complete the process smoothly. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments. Feel free to Message me on twitter @VirtualAndrewC

Links:
Deprecation of External PSC KB
Download and Mount the vCenter Server Appliance Installer for UI Convergence KB