When using VMware Cloud Foundation’s Async Patch Tool there are two different methods that can be used depending on the environment’s connectivity to the internet – the offline method and the online method. The online method is relatively straight forward and is extracted into the SDDC Manager virtual machine and SDDC Manager which allows the user to download the patches directly and then apply them. The offline method on the other hand requires the usage of a Windows or Linux and system that has access to the internet. This machine will download allow for the listing and downloading of the required bundles/patches, but the files will still need to be copied over to SDDC Manager in order for the upgrade to be executed. This post will focus on the Windows based offline method and the corresponding product documentation can be found here.
Prerequisites
- Windows or Linux machine with access to the internet (proxy is supported).
- Java 8 or Java 11 Installed.
- Windows or Linux machine with access to SDDC Manager for uploading downloaded bundles.
- Always refer to KB 88287 to be sure the correct files and versions are being used.
- Always use the latest version of the Async Patch Tool.
- Configure TCP keepalive in your SSH client to prevent socket connection timeouts.
- The Async Patch Tool is supported with VMware Cloud Foundation 4.2.1 and later.
Note: If an existing or older version of the Async Patch Tool exists in the directory, you will need to remove these files from both the Linux or Windows computer and the SDDC manager before downloading the latest version of the Async Patch Tool.
Prepare Environment
- Download VCF Async Patch Tool from VMware
- Select VCF Version > Drivers & Tools > VMware Cloud Foundation Tools > Async Patch Tool – always use the latest!
- Extract vcf-async-patch-tool-<version>.tar
- Move the extracted folder to a desired directory of choice.
- I used C:\Users\admin\Downloads\asyncPatchTool for easy finding in my lab.
- Open a command prompt of your choosing and navigate to C:\Users\admin\Download\asyncPatchTool\bin
- Personally, I like to create an output directory that has enough storage capacity and is easy to find. The output directory will be used in later posts with –outputDirectory to specify where the bundles, manifests, etc are downloaded to – here I used C:\Users\admin\Downloads\apToolBundles.
Expected User Experience
Be sure that you are using vcf-async-patch-tool.bat and not vcf-async-patch-tool. From here everything should run as expected as long as you’re using the .bat file. Below is example output of the –listAsyncPatch. I’ll be covering the actual upgrade process in another post, so stay tuned!
