Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
NSX for vSphere was released on December 4th and I’m sure you all dropped everything to get the bits upgraded in your lab environments. Good news is if your installs took as long as mine you might still have time to read this before they finish 😉 In all seriousness I would recommend setting aside a good amount of time. I have 3 clusters with a total of 8 hosts and 5 Edge Gateways it took a total of about 5 hours to complete the upgrade. Worst part is I told my wife I would be an hour and then we could go Christmas Shopping. Not good 😉 Good news is if you finish in 2 hours you get the rest of the day off. Seriously your boss called me and said that would be fine. Oh and if you are running EVO:Rail the upgrade only takes 1/4th of the time……. j/k.
To start you will need to download the upgrade bundle. IF you haven’t already I have the link in my post about the release.
First thing you will want to do before starting the upgrade is take a snapshot of your NSX manager Server. No seriously take a snapshot it will only add a few minutes to the overall time. Actually mine took a little bit of time to complete.
Performing the Upgrade
1. You will need to login to your NSX Manager web interface. Once you are logged in there is a nice big button that say’s “Upgrade”. Click it and it will bring you to the upgrade page. Once there click upgrade again. It will present you with a dialog box where you can upload the upgrade bundle. Follow the prompts to start the upload.
*Note – After my upgrade of the NSX Manager Server finished the NSX Manager Service has not started for a period of 30 minutes so I tried to start it manually. It would not. I then did a reboot of the NSX Manager Server and it came up no problems.
That’s it your upgrade is complete – haha you know you thought it was that easy 😉
2. You now need to go to the Networking and Security section within the vSphere Web Client and go to the installation section. Once there you will need to click where is say’s “Upgrade Available” next to the NSX Manager under Controller Cluster Status. It will start the upgrade process for your controllers.
*Note – This part took a considerable amount of time in the MoaC lab. It will only upgrade one controller at a time. First it will download the update on each one at a time and then go back through and upgrade each one at a time. They will end up at point showing disconnected and also rebooting, this is all fine…..as long as they all end up saying Normal, which is by the way they all need to start as well.
Notice in the screenshot above they all say Software version 6.1.38430, well once they are upgraded they should say 6.1.40269
3. Next you will need to select the Host Preparation tab at the top. Once the page opens Next to each cluster under Installation Status it will have an upgrade option. You will need to click this to upgrade the cluster. I recommend doing on at a time.
On my first attempt of the upgrade I my Management Cluster came back and said Not Ready with an option to resolve as you see in the below image. So I selected the resolve option and even though i didn’t know what was trying to be resolved tried it again. Well it didn’t work. After investigating the cluster under Hosts and Clusters I noticed the hosts in my Management Cluster said “Reboot Required” I thought the reboot would have been handled automatically and apparently it should. In my environment however there is something preventing it from doing it, so I needed to do it manually. I had to manually put the host in maintenance mode and reboot for each of my 8 hosts across my clusters. Once I did that NSX saw they as upgraded and ready.
4. Once the upgrade of all the hosts is complete and they all show a status of Ready we need to go to the NSX Edges and upgrade all the deployed NSX Edges. I like to start with the Logical Routers and work my way up to the Edge Gateways, but that is just me. Right click on each of the Edge devices and select “Upgrade Version”.
5. Once all your Edge devices show version 6.1.2 with a status of deployed you are home free and all done. Now go enjoy having the rest of the day off 😉
I am upgrading from 6.1.3 to 6.2 and followed basically the same procedure. FYI: The NSX manager connectivity to the vCenter was testy, so I had to reboot the vCenter after the upgrade was finished.