NSX

Upgrading VMware NSX-T to NSX 4.0.1

In preparation for vSphere 8 upgrades, I’m in the process of upgrading many of the solutions in the homelab before upgrading to the big 8.

I’m currently running NSX-T 3.2.1 with NSX Manager appliances. I have NSX deployed out to a cluster with a couple of Edge appliances in a cluster configuration.

For those that might’ve missed the word, it was announced early-2022 that NSX-T 3.x would be no longer and that the naming would be shifting to NSX with versions 4.x going forward. You can read more about this here.

The first step was to ensure I have a recent ‘Successful’ backup from within NSX-T manager itself.

When you go out to Customer Connect Downloads, you will want to download the NSX 4.0.1.1 *.mub Upgrade file.

Once the file is downloaded, I chose to upload it from my local system where I was using my browser to access the NSX interface.

Once the file uploads, the next step will be to click ‘Prepare for Upgrade’

The following process will take some time, you might even be prompted with a session timeout, In my instance I came up with the error “Repository synchronization operation was interrupted. Please click on resolve to retry. Repository synchronization failed. a ‘Retry’ ran and it completed the check successfully.

Once this process completed, it took me to step 2, the manager console will reload.

Click on the drop-down and select ‘All Pre-Checks’

After reviewing the results of the Upgrade, I reviewed the alarms and felt I wanted to move forward with the upgrade. The Edges are alarming due to Memory Consumption and the Manager alarms were relating to the NSX ‘audit’ account.

I selected to run the upgrade in ‘Serial’ and selected ‘After each group completes’ for Pause upgrade condition. click ‘Start’

The Edge upgrades completed successfully, I will click Next for the Hosts. There is also an option to ‘Run Post Checks’

The post checks ran fine and the next step is start the Hosts for upgrades.

The hosts upgrade completed successfully, I even ran the post upgrade check and it succeeded. The only gotcha for my cluster was I had to manually move some VMs onto other hosts and power some VMs down to conserve on resources, so once that was done, hosts entered maintenance mode.

The final step which was to upgrade the NSX Managers, click ‘Start’

So the upgrade failed immediately as the ‘audit’ account came back to bite me, there was a strange behaviour where when I update the password, the account was still showing a Password Expired status, I ‘Deactivated’ and ‘Activated’ the account and it showed Active. Once that was completed, the message also stated to take action on the ‘Alarm’ in NSX, so I went back and Acknowledged and Resolved alarms and did not leave any in Open status.

The upgrade will allow you to continue once you navigate back to System>>Upgrade. Go back to Step 1 and run the “Pre Check” for NSX Manager Only, before proceeding to the final upgrade step.

The upgrade completed successfully. You will notice the top left-corner banner will now only read ‘NSX’.

Uncategorized

Installation of SDDC Health Monitoring Solution 8.10

Whether you are running VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) or standalone vRealize LifeCycle Manager instance managing your vRealize products, the following management pack for vRealize Operations will help give a health monitoring dashboard to your solutions. You can monitor capacity growth over time as well as certificate monitoring.

You can obtain the management pack couple of different ways. One way is through the VMware Marketplace, download the pack and upload to the vRSLCM via SCP.


https://marketplace.cloud.vmware.com/services/details/sddc-health-monitoring-solution-8-10-1?slug=true

Always check the Marketplace carefully for management pack versions, publisher and release notes.

The other method to access the Marketplace through the vRealize Lifecycle Manager

In the lab I downloaded the pack and uploaded it to the following location on the appliance

Once uploaded, jump into the vRSLCM appliance, you can see here in the Environment section it shows no information available for Health and the ‘i’ icon explains what we need to do.

From the vROps Environment, click ‘View Details’, once inside the vROps environment, click on the ellipses and you will a pre-built action to install the SDDC Management Pack.

Once prompted I placed /data/marketplace and click Discover, this found the file I downloaded and uploaded. Click Submit

The Request page updates to Successfully deployed

After about 15-20 minutes, you will find health is Green now.

What to do next? Check out the newly installed dashboards in vROps.

Uncategorized

My First YouTube Video!

I have a whole renowned respect for content creators, influencers, and video graphic artists. Content creation is no joke, even the tool vROps itself requires individuals in organizations to be created with designing dashboards.

I’ve always wanted to do this, it’s a means of getting better and giving back to the community. There is still much to improve on, I mean this is just a series of clips of me performing an upgrade task.

In this video, I run through upgrading vROps using VMware’s LifeCycle Manager appliance.

Home Lab

NSX-T 3.2.1 – Error: Failed to fetch System details.

Running VMware NSX-T 3.2.1 on a clean install, no previous upgrade. Home lab is not sitting around doing much other than whatever idle tasks might be going on with the appliance. I decided to log in and BAM! The system section was not loading

Error code: 513002

Under System>>Configuration the following error would appear

I was able to navigate to check the basic health of my managers, and checked ‘View Details’ for each one; everything was up, all green, and space utilization looked good.

From the VM console logged in as admin, I tried ‘restart services controller ‘and no success.

While troubleshooting and looking for KBs and forums on the web, when running ‘get managers’ from admin console, one of my managers was in Standby, but then there was some intermittent activity where all went into Standby for a brief moment.

Not just this happening but my Appliances GUI was also now switching between ‘Healthy’ & Degraded.

Next step was to reboot one appliance at a time, which did not seem to fix the issue.

After taking a break and happen to be doing something else in the home lab, I had to shut down and restart the vCenter, well I happen to check later on in the day and NSX was able to load with no problems.

I’m going to keep this up in the event the issue comes around, I plan on updating.

QuickTip

QuickTip: What version of VMTools is on a ESXi host?

If you have been working with any kind of virtualization software, you will generally encounter a set of drivers that provide software for hardware to interact with a virtual machine. These are known as ‘drivers’ and allow interaction, performance optimization and many other features. With VMware, VMTools (Windows or Linux) can be delivered in many different ways.

One way in vSphere 7.x to find the available Tools Package on a ESXi; highlight a host, click ‘Updates’, under Baselines click ‘Show Installed’

Once the installed host extensions appear, you can filter on the ‘Name’ column and search for ‘tool’

If you want to cross-reference the Tool build with version number, the following VMware URL is a great resource for that.

https://packages.vmware.com/tools/versions

There are many other ways, please feel free to share. I personally would like to script the process to poll all hosts in an environment and report back what tools image is installed on a host.