vCF 3.7 to 3.8 Online Upgrade

In this post we will learn how to perform online upgrade of VMware Cloud Foundation from version 3.7.2 to 3.8.0. Although upgrade process is fairly simple and straight forward, it needs a bit of planning.

As a best practice, it is always recommended to read the release notes & known issues in new version of product before performing upgrade. vCF 3.8 known issues are documented here

To perform online upgrade of vCF, your SDDC Manager appliance should have direct connectivity to internet or via a proxy server.

Upgrade Prerequisites

Below screenshot from vCF documentation list the requirements that you should meet before attempting any upgrade operation.

vCF includes two types of bundles: Upgrade bundles & Install Bundles. To know more about these please read vCF official documentation

Upgrade Steps

To start the upgrade process we need to download the upgrade bundles. If you have configured repository settings and authorized my vmware account under Repository Settings, you will be notified about available updates.

If you click on the view details option, it will take you to Repository > Bundles page where you can either download the available upgrade right away or schedule it for later time.

Bundle download will start shortly.

Wait for some time for download to complete.

To apply the upgrade, navigate to Workload Domains and click on the domain where upgrade will be applied.

Note: Before upgrading any VI workload domain, its recommended o upgrade the management domain first.

Under selected domain navigate to Update/Patches and you will see there list of available updates. Click Precheck to validate that the environment is ready to be upgraded

Important Note: Do not run any domain operations while an update is in progress. Domain operations are creating a new VI domain, adding hosts to a cluster or adding a cluster to a workload domain, and removing clusters or hosts from a workload domain.

Click on Precheck view status to see detailed tasks and their status. If there are any failures, please fix it before kicking in the upgrade process. Once the issue has been fixed, click Retry Precheck to run the task again. You can also click Precheck Failed Resources to retry all failed tasks.

vCF is upgraded by applying the SDDC Manager bundle (contains upgrade for LCM and the SDDC Manager UI) to the management domain.

If you click on view details button, it will tell you the components that will be upgraded via the corresponding bundle.

Once precheck have passed, you can initiate the upgrade right away by clicking on “Update Now” button or schedule the upgrade for a later time.

if you click on update now button, you will see below message on top bar of the sddc manager portal.

Wait for the update process to complete. Below slideshow shows various stages of the upgrade process.

And finally the process completes. Hit Finish button to return back to SDDC Manager dashboard.

Once this step completes, download the VMware Cloud Foundation Update 3.8.0.0 bundle with description “This SDDC Manager Migration upgrade contains features, critical bug fixes and security fixes” and apply this bundle to the management workload domain.

When you start the upgrade using this bundle, you will be asked to setup a new SDDC Manager appliance with a temporary IP.