Smaller environments that have VCF 9 deployed might have a subset of the VCF components/appliances deployed. This minimizes the virtual infrastructure management footprint and resource consumption. For example, a three-host environment might have VCF Operations 9 + vCenter 9 + ESX 9. The downside to these types of deployments is you lose some of the VCF functionality such as fleet management. This begs the question, "How do I update the components I have?" You can upgrade version 9 components such as VCF Operations, vCenter, and ESX similar how you upgraded version 8 components.
We'll upgrade a small environment that consists of VCF Operations 9.0.1, vCenter 9.0.1, and ESX 9.0.1 hosts running a few workloads.
We'll update each component in the order below as recommended here:
- VCF Operations
- vCenter
- ESX
Download the .pak file for the VCF Operations version you are upgrading to. In this case, we are upgrading 9.0.1 to 9.0.2 so I need this file -- Operations-Upgrade-9.0.2.0.25137843.pak -- from the My Downloads section of the Broadcom Support Portal.
Next, I log into the admin console of VCF Operations. Add /admin to the VCF Operations URL, e.g., https://<vcf-ops-ip-address>/admin
In the left column, click on Software Update. Click the Install A Software Update button. Browse for the downloaded .pak file and click the Upload button.
The upload and staging of the file will likely take a few minutes. You might see the following warning:
"The update will restart the cluster for the entirety of the update."
This is referring to the VCF Operations cluster (even if it is a single-node cluster), not the ESX cluster. Continue through the upgrade wizard and click the Install button. The upgrade will naturally take some time.
The next component to upgrade is vCenter. Start by reading this knowledge base (KB) article:
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?legacyId=92659
We'll download and use the VMware-VCSA-all-9.0.2.0.25148086.iso file to upgrade from 9.0.1 to 9.0.2. You will need to mount that .iso file to the vCenter appliance similar to what is shown below.
Select vCenter in your vSphere Client inventory and click Updates. The UI will walk you through the vCenter upgrade.
You should back up vCenter before performing the upgrade. If you are not familiar with how to do this, start here:
https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vsphere/vsphere/9-0/vcenter-configuration/configuring-vcenter-server-using-the-management-interface/configure-and-schedule-backups.html
You might see a warning, "Plugin should be upgraded to proceed further." Simply click the Upgrade Plug-in link before clicking Next. This will take a few minutes.
You will likely have to run the pre-checks after the plug-in upgrade (shown below). Then click Next assuming the source pre-checks ran successfully.
Click the Configure Target Appliance link. The selections in this wizard should be familiar from previous vCenter upgrades. I used the default settings.
In the final step you'll click the Start Upgrade link and set the Switchover Execution. I chose Automated from the drop-down menu. After that, I started the upgrade and waited patiently. Behind the scenes, a new vCenter appliance is deployed, the settings and data from the original appliance are copied over, and a switch-over occurs from the original appliance to the new one. As you can probably imagine, this takes a while. Ensure you have sufficient storage and compute resources for this upgrade.
You can delete the old vCenter VM after confirming the upgrade/migration completed successfully.
Finally, we upgrade the ESX hosts. This is done using Lifecycle Manager in the vSphere Client. Click on the cluster or host if you have standalone hosts. Click on Updates. Edit the image to use the ESX version you want to upgrade to along with any vendor, firmware, and driver add-ons. Click Validate and then Save assuming the image is valid.
Lifecycle Manager should automatically check image compliance after you click Save. In the example below, we see that the single host in my lab environment is out of compliance with the new image.
Run the Pre-Check and then Remediate assuming the pre-check passed. Many upgrades still require a reboot although this is getting better with live patching. I recommend reading through the Lifecycle Manager documentation prior to using it. If you have a single host, you will need to shutdown all of the VMs on the host, put the host into maintenance mode, and perform an interactive upgrade using a CD, DVD, USB device, .iso file, ESXCLI, or script--reference this documentation for guidance.
