You can upgrade a single cell by running the VMware Cloud Director installer without command options. Before you restart an upgraded cell, you must upgrade the database schema. You upgrade the database schema after upgrading at least one cell in the server group.

You can use the VMware Cloud Director installer for Linux to upgrade a VMware Cloud Director server group that consists of VMware Cloud Director installations on a supported Linux OS. If your VMware Cloud Director server group consists of VMware Cloud Director 9.5 appliances deployments, you use the VMware Cloud Director installer for Linux to upgrade your existing environment only as part of the migration workflow. See Upgrading and Migrating the VMware Cloud Director Appliance.

For a multi-cell VMware Cloud Director installation, instead of manually upgrading each cell and the database in a sequence, you can perform an orchestrated upgrade of the VMware Cloud Director installation. See Perform an Orchestrated Upgrade of a VMware Cloud Director Installation.

Prerequisites

  • Verify that your VMware Cloud Director database, the vSphere components, and the NSX components are compatible with the new version of VMware Cloud Director.

    Important: If your existing VMware Cloud Director installation uses an Oracle database or a Microsoft SQL Server database, verify that you migrated to a PostgreSQL database before the upgrade. For the possible upgrade paths, see Upgrading VMware Cloud Director on Linux.
  • Verify that you have superuser credentials for the servers in your VMware Cloud Director server group.

  • If you want the installer to verify the digital signature of the installation file, download and install the VMware public key on the target server. If you already verified the digital signature of the installation file, you do not need to verify it again during installation. See Download and Install the VMware Public Key.

  • Verify that you have a valid license key to use the version of the VMware Cloud Director software to which you are upgrading.
  • Verify that you all ESXi hosts are activated. Deactivated ESXi hosts are unsupported.

  • Starting with version 10.3, VMware Cloud Director no longer allows administrator and tenant LDAP servers to bypass SSL certificate validation. Before you upgrade VMware Cloud Director, you must test your connection. If any of the organizations have these invalid configurations, for each one, you must turn off the Accept all certificates setting for the LDAP server and import the certificates in the LDAP settings UI.

    In recent releases, when you update the LDAP settings to turn off the Accept all certificates setting, a trust on first use dialog box automates the import of the certificate for the LDAP server of an organization. However, in earlier releases, it is a two-step process of turning the Accept all certificates setting off, and then, using the UI to upload the certificate of the LDAP server.

What to do next