Upgrade
Written by Simon Eady
on 10/3/2022
On the 10th February VCF 4.4 was released, this was quite a significant milestone as it removed a few things from the equation and also provided more flexbility.
Firstly and arguably the big change.
vRealize Suite
vRealize Lifecycle Manager 8.6.2, upgrade and deployment of the vRealize Suite products is managed by vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. You can upgrade vRealize Suite products as new versions become available in your vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager will only allow upgrades to compatible and supported versions of vRealize Suite products. Specific vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight, and Workspace ONE Access versions will no longer be listed in the VMware Cloud Foundation BOM.
Written by Simon Eady
on 5/4/2019
I recently upgraded an instance of vRA from 7.2 to 7.5 and rather than do it the manual way I used VMware’s vRealize LifeCycle Manager (version 2.0 update 3).
Everything was going great and according to plan, the vRLCM pre-requisites checker made short work of all of the checks you need to do before you start an upgrade of vRA. You can see below vRLCM does a great job of keeping you informed of the current progress and in a really elegant way.
Written by Sam McGeown
on 29/6/2018
Yesterday, Pivotal Container Service 1.1 dropped and, as it’s something I’ve been actively learning in my lab, I wanted to jump on the upgrade straight away. PKS with NSX-T is a really hot topic right now and I think it’s going to be a big part of the future CNA landscape.
My Lab PKS 1.0.4 deployment is configured as a “NO-NAT with Logical Switch (NSX-T) Topology” as depicted in the diagram below (from the PKS documentation). My setup has these network characteristics:
Written by Sam McGeown
on 22/12/2017
Yesterday saw the release of NSX-T 2.1, with some new features and also some usability enhancements. You can check out the release notes here
As I’m mid-way through this blog series, I thought I’d stick in the upgrade as a little bonus!
Download the upgrade bundle
Validate the version and status of NSX-T components
Check the Controller cluster status and Manager connections are up.
Written by Simon Eady
on 29/1/2016
As you will see the upgrade is simple and even though its early days I haven’t seen anything that has been broken!
If you are interested in seeing an example of the new utilization dashboard scroll to the bottom of this article.
Upgrading from 6.1
I will be doing this upgrade on a VA so to begin with I will need the vRealize Operations Manager - Virtual Appliance Operating System upgrade .pak file (Realize_Operations_Manager-VA-OS-6.2.0.3445569.pak)
Written by Sam McGeown
on 2/4/2015
I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab – basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
Now 6 has been GA a while and I have a little bit of time, I have begun the lab upgrade process. You can see a bit more about my lab hardware over on my
Written by Sam McGeown
on 2/4/2015I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab – basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
Now 6 has been GA a while and I have a little bit of time, I have begun the lab upgrade process. You can see a bit more about my lab hardware over on my
Written by Sam McGeown
on 1/4/2015I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab - basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
I will be upgrading
- vCenter Server Appliance - currently 5.5 update 1
- vSphere Update Manager - currently 5.5 update 1
- 3 HP N54L resource hosts
- 1 Intel NUC management host
In my lab I run various VMware software suites listed below, although I typically run them in nested environments to keep my lab install relatively clean.
Written by Sam McGeown
on 1/4/2015I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab - basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
Checking for driver compatibility
In vSphere 5.5, VMware dropped the drivers for quite a few consumer grade NICs - in 6 they’ve gone a step further and actually blocked quite a few of these using a VIB package. For more information, see this excellent article by Andreas Peetz.
Written by Sam McGeown
on 1/4/2015I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab - basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
Upgrading the vCenter Server Appliance
Download and mount the VMware-VCSA-all-6.0.0-2562643 ISO image (mounted as G:\ on my workstation).
Browse the ISO and run the Client Integration Plugin “G:\vcsa\VMware-ClientIntegrationPlugin-6.0.0.exe” - it’s a simple next, next finish sort of install.