One of the most cumbersome tasks for VCF customers and administrators has always been performing upgrades. Prior to VCF 5.0 the only way to “upgrade” between major versions like VCF 3.x to VCF 4.x, required a lot of manual intervention, orchestration tooling and a playbook for the support or services representative to run through. These migration releases are not publicly available and require services to either use the migration playbooks or install a new VCF instance and migrate the existing workload. Please contact your account team if you are looking for a migration.
Starting with VCF on VxRail 5.0, it is now possible to upgrade from VCF 4.3.x or later directly to VCF 5.x. This post will be focused on an environment that was built running VCF 4.5.1 on VxRail 7.0.450 and will be upgrading to VCF 5.0.0.0 on VxRail 8.0.100. Note that this environment has access to the internet to download the required bundles. If the environment does not have internet access, then the Bundle Transfer Utility can be used to download the correct bundles.
Upgrade Planning
Getting the environment prepared and fully understanding the planned upgrade path is paramount for a successful upgrade. Dell and VMware have done a great job of outlining all of the upgrade states, a functionality during upgrade matrix, as well as supported topologies in their VCF on VxRail 5.0 upgrade guidance. There are also a few UI change that were introduced in this release that will help with planning the upgrade. One of the new features allows the user to select their planned upgrade path and provides a summary of all the source and target build numbers and versions for the given upgrade path.
When a new version of VCF is available in an internet connected environment there will be a notification banner displayed at the top of the SDDC Manager UI and the workload domains will show as update available. Select the workload domain that is planned for upgrade first and select the upgrade path.
Executing the Plan
Now that the upgrade path has been selected, SDDC Manager understands the upgrade path intentions and will filter the required bundle downloads appropriately. There is not a screenshot of the pre-check, but always remember to run a pre-check prior to upgrading a VCF environment!
SDDC Manager
Download the SDDC Manager and configuration drift bundles, then apply the SDDC upgrade first. While SDDC Manager is being upgraded there is a status view that allows the user to watch the progress of the upgrade. Once SDDC Manager is upgraded successfully the applied bundles section will show that a bundle has been applied. Drilling down into the applied bundles section will display which bundle(s) has been applied.
Configuration Drift
The steps to apply the configuration drift bundle are the same as the SDDC Manager bundle. Once downloaded and applied the applied bundles section will increment and show that both SDDC Manager and the configuration drift bundles have been applied successfully.
NSX
Remember back to the first section where we discussed how the upgrade plan filters out bundles that are not part of the upgrade path/plan? That means the next bundle to downland and apply is NSX. If you’ve ever done a VCF upgrade, you should be familiar with the UI screens, as the workflow is essentially the same as before. This environment is a single cluster and does not have an NSX edge cluster deployed on it, so all the defaults were selected, and the bundle was applied successfully.
vCenter
Updating vCenter is again the same workflow that most VCF administrators are used to. Once the bundle has been downloaded and update has been selected, the user is presented with a confirmation about backups and temporary network information. Since VCF deploys a new vCenter and migrates the old vCenter data to it, a temporary IP address is needed to allow communication between the new and old vCenter. Now that the bundle has been applied successfully, the applied bundles section shows just one more bundle left.
VxRail
Upgrading the VxRail environment uses a similar workflow to the rest of the components. Simply download the VxRail bundle from SDDC Manager’s UI and select update. Follow the prompts on screen, as every maintenance window and environment require different selections. Now that the VxRail bundle has been applied you can see that there are no more bundles to be applied and a big green check box is displayed. Notice that relicensing is required when upgrading from one major version to another major version. Information about how to update licenses can be found here.
Verifying Success
Another one of the SDDC Manager UI enhancements is a tab named release versions starting with VCF on VxRail 5.0. This new tab allows the user to see what workload domains are running which VCF BOM and the component versions within that BOM.
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