Upgrade to vCloud Director 10 appliance

In this article I will describe a procedure how you can upgrade to the vCloud Director 10 appliance.

We’re going to perform an upgrade from vCloud Director 9.7.0.14534864 to version 10.0.0.14636284.
The update process takes around 10 to 15 minutes in total, based on a three vCD cell setup.
The release notes for vCloud Director 10 can be found here.

If your upgrade path is different, for example upgrading from vCloud Director 9.0 or vCloud Director 9.5 with an external database to vCloud Director 10 with the embedded PostgreSQL database please check the Upgrade and Migration Paths and Workflows here:

VMware Docs – Upgrading vCloud Director – Upgrade and Migration Paths and Workflow

These are the specifics of my vCloud Director lab:

• Currently we’re running vCloud Director v9.7.0.3
• We’re using the appliances with embedded PostgreSQL
• The lab consists of 3 vCloud Director cells.
  A guide to configure vCD in a multi-cell setup can be found here.
• vSphere 6.7
• NSX-V 6.4.6

Now, let’s get started with the upgrade to vCloud Director 10!

Prerequisites

• Shutdown the primary vCD cell.
• Take a vSphere snapshot.
• Boot the vCD cell.
• Check the database status.

Upgrade the primary vCloud Director appliance

• Download the upgrade package from My.VMware.com
• Create a local-update-package folder in /tmp/
• Upload the upgrade package to your vCD cell.
  I’m using WinSCP to do this.
• Extract the upgrade package to /tmp/local-update-package

tar -zxf VMware_vCloud_Director_v.v.v.v-nnnnnnnn_update.tar.gz \ -C /tmp/local-update-package 

• Define the folder as the update repository

vamicli	update --repo file:///tmp/local-update-package

• Pre-check the directory

vamicli update --check

• Stop the vCloud Director services

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool -u <admin username> cell --shutdown

• Apply the upgrade

vamicli update --install latest

Upgrade vcd-cell02 and vcd-cell03

For vcd-cell02 and vcd-cell03 the steps are the same:

• Download the upgrade package from My.VMware.com
• Create a local-update-package folder in /tmp/
• Upload the upgrade package to your vCD cell.
• Extract the upgrade package to /tmp/local-update-package
• Define the folder as the update repository
• Pre-check the directory
• Stop the vCloud Director services
• Apply the upgrade
• Do not reboot the cells yet!

Upgrade the vCloud Director database

• Create a backup of the vCloud Director database from the primary cell

/opt/vmware/appliance/bin/create-db-backup

• Upgrade the database from any of the appliances

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/upgrade

• Reboot all of the appliances

shutdown -r now

Post checks

The reboot of the appliances will take roughly 5 minutes.

After the reboot is complete you can connect to the admin interface and navigate to Cloud Cells. You can check your version here:

After the reboot you can check the database availability by browsing to the vCloud Director Appliance Management interface on port 5480. (use the FQDN or IP of one of the cells and add port 5480.

https://<vCD-Cell01-FQDN-or-IP>:5480

After performing your post checks, remove the snapshots.

Other interesting vCloud Director related articles:

• Install Public SSL certificates on vCloud Director
• Upgrade to vCloud Director 9.7
• Setup a NFS share for vCloud Director with Windows Server 2019