In my previous blog, I documented upgrading the SDDC Manager to the latest version available. Now that it’s completed, I will be moving onto the Management Domain.
I also recorded the steps on video if anyone wants to watch or follow along in their labs.
From the SDDC Manager UI left-hand navigation pane, select ‘Workload Domains’, select the domain to browse, and go to ‘Updates’
Pre Checks & Downloading
You will find that I previously ran some pre-checks and tried addressing those; lots of those were VCSA file-level backups in the VAMI, incompatibility issues with vSAN (this is expected for my case with my homelab hardware).
Scroll a little further and check out the versioning for the existing components.
When I go back up to the PreChecks, I have the option to Silcen Alerts so that I can resume upgrades.
I will silence the first one regarding the disk group mode and selecting All Clusters option..now the errors do continue to appear, so not entirely sure it’s really silencing.
Going back to our Updates section under ‘Available Updates’, you should see ‘Plan Patching’
Here we can select our targeted versions and validate because we upgraded SDDC Manager Independently.
Once validated, you will find our updated sequence
After clicking ‘Done’, we now have the option to Schedule or Download Now
Starting Step 1 – NSX Upgrades
Once the downloads complete successfully, an update to click ‘Configure Update’ should appear; once clicked, this will bring up a wizard-like screen. Because I have no NSX Edges, this part will be skipped to step 3,
I will select to upgrade the hosts sequentially, click Next and then click ‘Run Precheck’
If the Precheck succeeds, proceed with scheduling
The first step will be Review, and then you can pick ‘Upgrade Now’ or ‘Schedule Update’
In our Update section, we now have an update in progress
We can click on View Status and get more detailed steps of the NSX upgrade
You can also monitor the Upgrade Sequence from the Domain ‘Update’ section
While waiting, if you’re curious what is happening from the NSX console, you can see it’s telling you about an upgrade and that it’s managed through SDDC
The upgrade completed successfully..
Starting Step 2 – vCenter Bundle Download & Upgrade
Our Available Updates will now move onto the vCenter, we can click Download
Once the download completes, click ‘Configure Update’
The upgrade wizard for the vCenter upgrade appears. There is a mention of upgrading vCenter with ‘Reduced Downtime Upgrade’. There is a link to learn more about it, essentially, it will deploy a new appliance,e and you can plan a maintenance window to perform the remainder of the migration.
Confirm your backup options, and as part of the vCenter upgrade, a temporary IP address is required so that the new vCenter is stood up in parallel (pre data-migration)
There are options to schedule the preparation and switchover, but I’m doing everything to run immediately. The next screen will be to confirm and review. Click Finish.
We now have an upgrade in process
If we hop over to our vCenter, there is the newly deployed appliance
After a while, the upgrade succeeded
Step 3 – vSphere 8.0 ESXi Host Upgrades
Before going too deep on lifecycling the hosts, there is some pre-requisite work setting up and configuring a targeted vLCM image on a cluster.
Now onto step 3, in our same Update section, we will kick off the Download
If we stop and check in on our overall upgrade, you can see the final step will be the ESXI upgrade, but there a few things we need to do.
Step 3a – Prerequisite before kicking off Step 3 – Configuring vLCM Cluster Image
From the vSphere client, select the cluster we want to upgrade, click ‘Updates’ and then ‘Edit’ the existing image
We’re going to select the latest version available
Click ‘Save’ and some compatibility checks will kick off. Go over to the SDDC Manager UI and access the Lifecycle Management >> Image Management, select ‘Import Image’
Select the Workload Domain and cluster underneath it. Continue with naming the Image and then extract the Image.
Once the task is complete, we go over to the domain we’re updating and back into ‘Updates’ to resume configuring our update. It may be at ‘Configure’ or ‘Reconfigure Update’
Select the cluster, and the next step would be to ‘Assign Image’..Look at that..we do not have an Image. Let’s cancel out and go get an Image created.
From the drop-down menu, select the image you extracted and click ‘Assign Image’ – Click Next
Customize selection depending on your environment, I’m choosing the following
The final step should be to review settings and click ‘Run Precheck’
Once the Pre Check completes, you will be presented with a ‘Schedule Now’
Run through the schedule wizard to select immediately or for later, and monitor the upgrade.
