Virtualization & Storage
In this 2 part series I will provide an example walk-thru upgrade of: VCF 5.1 (VxRail 8.0.200) -> 5.1.1 upgrade (VxRail 8.0.210) Part 1 covered upgrading the management domain. In […]
In this 2 part series I will provide an example walk-thru upgrade of:
VCF 5.1 (VxRail 8.0.200) -> 5.1.1 upgrade (VxRail 8.0.210)
Part 1 covered upgrading the management domain. In the 2nd part of this series I will provide an example walk-thru upgrade of a VCF VI Workload Domain with vLCM enabled.
This upgrade consists of a 3x BUNDLE upgrade process executed in the following sequence:
By expanding the Lifecycle Management tab within SDDC manager it is possible to view the full list of components deployed as part of VCF and their respective current running code versions. From below we highlight that the MGMT WLD is now running code level 5.1.1 while the VI WLD ‘crk-w01’ is running at code level 5.1.0.0:
The following is a very useful VMware kb article detailing the BOM for each VCF release:
Correlating VMware Cloud Foundation version with the versions of its constituent products
It is also advisable to read the release notes of the target version prior to performing the upgrade.
Release Notes: the bill-of-materials below can be officially referenced in the following Release Notes links :
DELL: VCF 5.1.1 on VxRail Release Notes
VMware: VCF 5.1.1 on VxRail Release Notes
You can perform a sequential or skip-level upgrade to VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1.1 on Dell VxRail from VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4 or later. If your environment is at a version earlier than 4.4, you must upgrade the management domain and all VI workload domains to VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4 or later and then upgrade to VMware Cloud Foundation 5.1.1.
The sequence of the upgrade is defined within SDDC Manager itself. SDDC Manager presents the next available upgrade bundle throughout the procedure which makes the overall procedure quite easy and seamless to the end user performing the upgrade. In an effort to incrementally speed up the process of upgrading it is advisable to download all the required bundles in advance (bundles marked as available/future apply), as some of the bundles can be quite large in size for example the NSX bundle is 12GB. After each of the bundles have been downloaded click View Details, which details the version changes that will be applied as part of the bundle upgrade. The update bundles can be applied manually or scheduled for a preferred time window.
Ensure to run the upgrade Precheck tasks from within SDDC Manager in order to validate VCF is in a healthy state before proceeding with each of the upgrades and view the health status of each component by expanding their respective results. If the precheck has failed, fix the issue and then retry the precheck task to repeat the validation process. (More details on context level prechecks here). It is also advisable to run VxVerify – Pre-upgrade Health Check Tool.
Important: Before proceeding with the upgrade ensure to take snapshots of your management virtual machines. Do not perform any SDDC workflows on the VI WLD during the upgrade and confirm no failed workflows or errors are displayed in SDDC manager.
While proceeding with the updates, click on View update activity to monitor progress and track progress via the lcm log:
tail -f /var/log/vmware/vcf/lcm/lcm.log
lcm-debug log file contains debug level logging information.
It is also possible to confirm a successful update via the SDDC manager ssh console:
cat /var/log/vmware/vcf/lcm/lcm.log | grep “reached final state COMPLETED_WITH_SUCCESS”
All of the above steps/guidelines are displayed as part of the walk-thru series detailed for each of the upgrades below.
You will notice a reference to update license but this is only applicable if upgrading from a VMware Cloud Foundation version prior to 5.0.
If there are any congiguration updates displaying as available in the SDDC MGR UI then it’s best to apply those in advance of the upgrade.
Stepping through each of the upgrade bundles:
In order to check the availability of Update/Patches from within the SDDC manager console navigate to Inventory->WLD->Updates and begin the ‘PLAN UPGRADE’ process. In this example we see that NSX 4.1.2.3 update is the first available bundle to be applied:
Running precheck highlights there is no backup of vCenter recorded:
Configure, backup and retry for successfull precheck:
Proceeding with vCenter upgrade:
Precheck highlights SSH is not enabled for a host in the cluster. Ensure SSH is enabled on all hosts in advance of upgrade:
VxRail Upgrade sequence of steps (Time Taken 3hrs 12mins 50s):
psql -U postgres vxrail -c "select id,state,owner from system.operation_status where owner='LcmBundleDeployAndUpgrade';"
Upgrade Completed:
After all upgrades have completed successfully:
Reference:
DavidRing.ie 
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