Upgrading to VCF 9 comes in three main pathways:
- VCF 5.x
- vSphere 8 with NSX
- vSphere 8 without NSX
In this article we will be exploring the upgrade path for VCF 5.x, you will already have the Aria suite on version 8, so upgrading to VCF 9 is a pretty simple process
Aria LCM
Aria LCM needs to be patched to allow the upgrade of Operations and the deployment of the Fleet Manager server, this can be managed within Aria LCM, all you need to o is upload the patch file
Operations/Fleet Manager
Operations needs upgrading to v9, and Fleet Management needs deploying, the Aria LCM GUI provides a nice easy workflow for doing this you just need to import the files
VCF Automation/Operations For Networks
VCF Automation/Operations For Networks needs upgrading if you have these, all they need is importing to the Fleet Management server like so
Our upgrade binaries can be downloaded directly to the Fleet Manager
And the workflow can be followed
SDDC Manager
Then your SDDC Manager can be upgraded, simply download and apply the update directly from VCF Operations
Starting with the management domain, your workload domains can be upgraded, per domain the following order will need doing
NSX
NSX can be pre checked from the VCF Operations UI
Updates can be scheduled in or out of hours
And we can see the progress as it goes through all the NSX components
vCenter
The new reduced downtime upgrade is required here
We then need temporary networking for the vCenter
We can schedule the time to upgrade, immediately, of out of hours
And we can monitor the status
Supervisor
The supervisor can be configured to pull from the online content library for update files, then we can see the latest Supervisor update
And apply them to our Supervisor
ESX
It is recommended to update your host firmware first, after its a case of upgrading in VCF Operations and running prechecks
Selecting the image to upgrade to
And scheduling it
vSAN
For vSAN 9, we just need to do a disk format, which we can do from vSphere, running pre checks and then upgrading
