upgrade

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.

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.

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).

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 https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-NSX-T/2.1/rn/VMware-NSX-T-21-Release-Notes.html 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. Validate the hosts are installed, and have a connection to the controller and manager.

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 .

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 lab page.

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 lab page.

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 lab page.

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 lab page.

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 lab page.