1. March 2023

The default partition ‘/’ has only 3.8 GB of available space. Enter a new export directory on the source machine below – vCenter Upgrade

By H. Cemre Günay

Since there are still numerous VMware vSphere 6.7 appliances and they are no longer supported since October 15, 2022, upgrade projects with our customers are increasing. During the upgrade process we encountered a warning in Stage 2, which prevented the process from continuing.

When the OVA deployment finishes, you are redirected to Stage 2 of the upgrade process to transfer the data from the old appliance and start the services of the newly deployed vCenter Server appliance.

And exactly for this data transfer there was not enough storage space in the default partition. To fix this issue, the following steps are needed. The warning is already in the blog headline, but here is a screenshot directly from the vCenter Server Installer UI:

So we need a partition which has enough space. For this we need to SSH to the source vCenter appliance and check the directories by following Command:

df -h

In our case, we used /storage/updatemgr directory as it has enough space available:

Finally, we copy the path /storage/updatemgr, add it to the vCenter Server Installer and can proceed with Stage 2 and the data transfer.

And that is it from this small vCenter Upgrade issue Tutorial. If you have any questions, please leave it in the comment section below.