After a major new version of VMware Cloud Director becomes available in VMware Cloud Director service, you can choose when to upgrade your environment.

A maintenance window, the time during which an upgrade takes place, is defined as part of the VMware Cloud Director instance deployment. Two hours per week are required for a maintenance window. During the maintenance window, you might experience a few minutes of downtime while the upgrade is taking place. All downtime is measured in accordance with the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for the service offering. For information about how to set or modify a maintenance window, see How Do I Modify the Maintenance Window for a VMware Cloud Director Instance in VMware Cloud Director service.

When a new major version of VMware Cloud Director becomes available in VMware Cloud Director service, you can choose to queue each of your VMware Cloud Director instances for upgrade within the next weekly maintenance window. Alternatively, you can use a transition period to review upgrade compatibility reports and to announce the upgrade features that will become available to tenants, but after the end of service date for earlier versions, all VMware Cloud Director instances in your environment are upgraded automatically. See How Do I Queue a Major Upgrade in VMware Cloud Director service.

You can postpone a minor upgrade for a maximum of one week at a time. For information about how to postpone an upgrade, see How Do I Postpone A Minor Upgrade of a VMware Cloud Director Instance in VMware Cloud Director service.

If an upgrade is unsuccessful, your VMware Cloud Director instance is rolled back to its previous version and your upgrade might be postponed by a week.

Understanding Upgrade Categories in VMware Cloud Director service

VMware Cloud Director service provides the option to select the VMware Cloud Director version that you want to maintain with upgrades.

When you create a VMware Cloud Director instance, you select an upgrade category by choosing either an Early Access or Standard VMware Cloud Director version to which to upgrade.

Downgrades of VMware Cloud Director are not supported, so once you select an upgrade category, you cannot change it to an earlier version of VMware Cloud Director.

After a new major version of VMware Cloud Director becomes available in VMware Cloud Director service, you can choose when to upgrade your environment. When you upgrade to a major new version, you change your upgrade path.

Selecting an upgrade category corresponds to selecting how quickly the deployed instances will be upgraded. As a provider, you can select to use the Early Access category on the upgrade path and get new features, Beta versions and bug fixes faster. In this case, you might experience more fixes and, because of that, you would have less information about the implemented changes.

The following table lists the available upgrade paths, the categories in each path, and their descriptions.

Upgrade path Category Description
Release 10.X.x This upgrade path contains VMware Cloud Director builds that have gone through the complete testing and release process.
10.X.x Standard The default, stable Production build that most VMware Cloud Director instances must run.
10.X.x Early Access

You can use the Early Access station for early testing of features that can be later included in a standard release.

Consider this build unstable for production workloads.

How Do I Queue a Major Upgrade in VMware Cloud Director service

After a new major version of VMware Cloud Director becomes available, you can choose when to upgrade the VMware Cloud Director instances in your environment.

When a new major version of VMware Cloud Director becomes available in VMware Cloud Director service, you can choose to queue each of your VMware Cloud Director instances for upgrade within the next weekly maintenance window, or you can postpone the upgrade for a certain amount of time, after which all VMware Cloud Director instances in your environment will be upgraded automatically.

Procedure

  1. Log in to VMware Cloud Director service.
  2. Click Cloud Director Instances.
  3. In the card of the VMware Cloud Director instance for which you want to report a problem, click Details.
    The Summary panel for the VMware Cloud Director instance opens.
  4. Click the Maintenance panel.
  5. Review the results from the compatibility check in the Compatibility tab and, if necessary, resolve any issues before proceeding.
  6. To upgrade the VMware Cloud Director instance during the upcoming weekly maintenance window, click Queue Upgrade.

Results

The upgrade to the new major VMware Cloud Director is queued for the next weekly maintenance window.

What to do next

If necessary, you can reconfigure your weekly maintenance window. See How Do I Modify the Maintenance Window for a VMware Cloud Director Instance in VMware Cloud Director service.

How Do I Modify the Maintenance Window for a VMware Cloud Director Instance in VMware Cloud Director service

You can modify the time during which a VMware Cloud Director instance is stopped for weekly maintenance and upgrade.

Procedure

  1. Log in to VMware Cloud Director service.
  2. Click Cloud Director Instances.
  3. In the card of the VMware Cloud Director instance, click Actions > Configure Upgrade.
  4. From the Maintenance Day drop-down menu, select a day of the week for the maintenance window.
  5. From the Maintenance Hour drop-down menu, select a two-hour period for the maintenance window.
    Note: Maintenance windows are scheduled using UTC time.
  6. To save your changes, click Apply.

How Do I Postpone A Minor Upgrade of a VMware Cloud Director Instance in VMware Cloud Director service

You can postpone minor upgrades of your VMware Cloud Director instance for a maximum of one week at a time.

Procedure

  1. Log in to VMware Cloud Director service.
  2. Click Cloud Director Instances.
  3. In the card of the VMware Cloud Director instance, click Actions > Configure Upgrade.
  4. To postpone the upgrade of the VMware Cloud Director, select the Skip the next maintenance window check box.
  5. To confirm, click Apply.