Tag: Upgrade

Is updating @VMware ESXi at @Nutanix really that easy?

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Do you want the short answer or the long answer?

Short: Yes!

Long: Absolutely!

The real story:

  • After doing several Acropolis (CVM) & NCC (Health check) upgrades before on my customer’s Nutanix clusters today was the first time to do an actual hypervisor upgrade. Since we run everything on VMware we wanted to go from 5.5u2 to 6.0u2. The first things to do is to check all compatibility charts and with Acropolis at 4.6.4 and NCC at 2.2.8 we had green lights all over the board.
  • What I always do first before doing anything is running a health check. Since NCC 2.2 you can run some of the checks parallel to save some time:
ncc health_checks run_all -parallel=4

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  • After the check and make sure DRS is set on automated and vSphere HA is turned on as it should otherwise you won’t be updating anything!
  • Next up is heading to Prism, no we’re not doing any cli work when a GUI is better and just as fast!
  • The first thing to do is upload the software (Offline bundle zip file from VMware.com and json file from Nutanix.com)

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  • Go to Software Upgrade

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  • Select Upload the hypervisor Binary

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  • Select the binary and the Json files and hit Upload Now

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  • When this is done hit the arrow besides the upgrade button and select the pre-check (the real upgrade also does this but it is never wrong to check twice!)

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  • Enter the IP of the vCenter (not DNS!) and credentials

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  • This won’t take long but if you get bored hit the Nothing do to button for a game of 2048 presented to you by our friends at Nutanix

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  • You might need to re-open the Software Upgrade but but somewhere it will be done now

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  • When this finishes successful it’s time to hit the real upgrade button

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  • You know what to do here right?

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  • The waiting game has started since there will be a lot of vMotion’s and reboots
  • This it might be time for this again

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  • If you re-open the Software Upgrade bit it will show the versions of ESXi the cluster is now running

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  • Aaaaaaand we’re done

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So actually creating this post took longer then the preparation and actions for the upgrade themselves. For me that was 5 minutes work in preparation and about 20 minutes per host for the upgrade itself.