Welcome to this technical blog post, where we will guide you through the process of upgrading VMware Cloud Director from version 10.3 to the latest release, 10.4.2. Let’s get started!
The latest VMware Cloud Director 10.4.2 provides new features and enhancements that boost the functionality and performance of your cloud infrastructure. To mention:
- IDP Proxy: VMware Cloud Director can now act as an identity provider proxy server, allowing tenant-aware authentication of users through registered OAuth 2.0 OpenID Connect compliant Identity Providers.
- Trusted Platform Module Support: Support for VMs with Trusted Platform Module (TPM) devices, providing enhanced security to guest operating systems. Certain prerequisites need to be met for adding TPM devices to VMs.
- User Management Enhancements: A UI-based bulk user edit option for remapping users between identity providers (IDPs), and the introduction of a mandatory email property for user notification purposes.
- vApp Lease Expiry Timeout: The default vApp lease expiration time now defaults to ‘Unlimited’ for newly created tenant organizations.
- vSAN HCI Mesh Placement Policy: Restriction implemented to prevent VMs from spreading across multiple datastores when one of the datastores is a remote datastore in an HCI Mesh vSAN cluster.
- Improved Provider Login Experience: Enhancements to the provider login experience, redirecting to the Service Provider Admin Portal login page when entering ‘system’ in the Organization name text box.
- Improved Tenant Login Experience: When SAML or OIDC are configured, the UI displays only the Sign in with Single Sign-On option, with specific URLs provided for logging in as a local user.
Pre-Upgrade tasks
Before initiating the upgrade process, it’s crucial to perform pre-checks by validating the compatibility of existing plugins, extensions, and integrations with Cloud Director 10.4.2, and taking comprehensive backups of data and configurations to ensure a fallback option in case of unforeseen issues.
Check the Product interoperability: Link Here. In our case the versions are supported by Cloud Director 10.4.2:
For a smooth upgrade process from version 10.1 or later or when patching, it’s important to take a snapshot of the primary VMware Cloud Director appliance before making any changes. Remember to change the failover mode to Manual during the upgrade if automatic failover is enabled and set it back to Automatic once the upgrade is complete. Go to the vCenter Server instance where the primary appliance is located and shut down the guest OS. Take a snapshot by right-clicking the appliance, selecting Snapshots, entering a name and description, and clicking OK. Power on the appliance and check that all nodes in the database high availability configuration are in good condition. Lastly, make sure to familiarise yourself with the backup procedure for the VMware Cloud Director appliance. Below you can find the links:
– Back Up the Embedded Database of the VMware Cloud Director Appliance
– Automatic Failover of the VMware Cloud Director Appliance
– View the VMware Cloud Director Appliance Cluster Health and Failover Mode
Transferring the *.tar.gz appliance update file to the primary VCD Cell using WINSCP is necessary to upgrade. If there are multiple cells in your deployment, it is important to upgrade them sequentially, starting with the first cell and then moving on to the second and third.
Product Download
Upgrade Tasks
- Login to the primary cell as root
- Create the local-update-package directory in which to extract the update package.
mkdir /tmp/local-update-package
- Extract the update package in the newly created directory.
tar -zxf VMware_Cloud_Director_10.4.2.9540-21596272_update.tar.gz -C /tmp/local-update-package
root@vcd-01 [ /tmp/local-update-package ]# ls -l
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 201 201 120 Apr 13 02:07 manifest
drwxr-xr-x 2 201 201 5500 Apr 13 02:07 package-pool- Set the local-update-package directory as the update repository.
vamicli update --repo file:///tmp/local-update-package
- Check for updates to verify that you established correctly the repository.
vamicli update --check
- Create a backup using the primary or standby appliance management UI.
- Log into VMware Cloud Director Appliance, https://:5480 , the same port as vCSA VAMI.
- Go to the Backup tab and run the backup job. Once it’s successfully completed, continue with the installation
- Apply the available upgrade.
vamicli update --install latest
- From any appliance (if you have multiple cells), run the VMware Cloud Director database upgrade utility
/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/upgrade
- Reboot each VMware Cloud Director appliance.
shutdown -r nowPost upgrade tasks
After completing the upgrade, perform post-checks such as thoroughly testing the functionality and performance of your Cloud Director environment, monitoring system logs for any errors or anomalies and addressing them promptly, and performing regular health checks to validate the overall health and stability of your upgraded Cloud Director environment.
Verify that the upgrade is successful.
- Log in to the VMware Cloud Director Service Provider Admin Portal.
- Log in to the VMware Cloud Director appliance management UI and confirm that all the appliances appear with a
Healthystatus.
Verify that the logs do not show any certificate convert errors during the upgrade. If there are certificate convert errors in the logs, you cannot backup the VMware Cloud Director appliance. If any errors appear, do not attempt the upgrade again and depending on the error, fix the problem manually before running the convert command again. Please refer to this VMware KB to for certificate troubleshooting.
You can look at the cell.log to confirm the initialization has been successfully completed.
root@vcd-01 [ ~ ]# tail /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/logs/cell.log
com.vmware.vcloud.metrics-core Subsystem Status: [COMPLETE]
com.vmware.vcloud.multi-site-core Subsystem Status: [COMPLETE]
com.vmware.vcloud.multi-site-api Subsystem Status: [COMPLETE]
com.vmware.vcloud.rest-api-handlers Subsystem Status: [WAITING]
Application Initialization: 'Legacy Cell Application' 100% complete. Subsystem 'com.vmware.vcloud.rest-api-handlers' started
Application Initialization: 'Legacy Cell Application' complete.
Successfully handled all queued events.
Successfully verified transfer spooling area: VfsFile[fileObject=file:///opt/vmware/vcloud-director/data/transfer]
Cell startup completed in 4m 33s
If the testing is successful delete the snapshots
If the upgrade is not successful, you can roll back the VMware Cloud Director appliance to the snapshot that you took before the upgrade. See Roll Back a VMware Cloud Director Appliance When an Upgrade Fails.
Upgrading VMware Cloud Director from version 10.3 to 10.4.2 is a critical step to leverage the latest features and enhancements for your cloud infrastructure. By following the pre-checks, pre-tasks, upgrade steps, and post-checks outlined in this guide, you can ensure a successful upgrade process. Stay up to date with the latest advancements in VMware Cloud Director and unlock its full potential. For more detailed information on VMware Cloud Director 10.4, refer to the official documentation.
We hope this blog post has helped you understand the upgrade process of VMware Cloud Director. If you have any questions or experiences to share, feel free to leave a comment below.
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Last updated: May 17, 2018
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