You can use the VMware Update Repository to upgrade your VMware Cloud Director appliance.
During the upgrade of the VMware Cloud Director appliance deployment, the VMware Cloud Director service stops working and some downtime can be expected. The downtime depends on the time you need to upgrade each VMware Cloud Director appliance and to run the VMware Cloud Director database upgrade script. The number of working cells in the VMware Cloud Director server group reduces until you stop the VMware Cloud Director service on the last VMware Cloud Director appliance. A properly configured load balancer in front of the VMware Cloud Director HTTP endpoints should stop routing traffic to the cells that are stopped.
After you apply the upgrade to every VMware Cloud Director appliance and the database upgrade is complete, you must reboot each VMware Cloud Director appliance.
Prerequisites
- Take a snapshot of the primary VMware Cloud Director appliance.
- When upgrading from version 10.1 or later or when patching, if the automatic failover in case of a primary database service failure is enabled, change the failover mode to
Manual
for the duration of the upgrade. After the upgrade, you can set the failover mode toAutomatic
. See Automatic Failover of Your VMware Cloud Director Appliance. - Log in to the vCenter Server instance on which resides the primary VMware Cloud Director appliance of your database high availability cluster.
- Navigate to the primary VMware Cloud Director appliance, right-click it, and click .
- Right-click the appliance and click OK. . Enter a name and, optionally, a description for the snapshot, and click
- Right-click the VMware Cloud Director appliance and click .
- Verify that all nodes in your database high availability configuration are in a good state. See View Your VMware Cloud Director Appliance Cluster Health and Failover Mode.
- When upgrading from version 10.1 or later or when patching, if the automatic failover in case of a primary database service failure is enabled, change the failover mode to
-
Important: VMware Cloud Director 10.5.1 and later no longer accepts certificates whose signature algorithms use SHA-1.For VMware Cloud Director 10.5.1 and later, verify that none of the certificates in the certificate chain use SHA-1 as their signature algorithm, for example,
sha1WithRSAEncryption
. - Verify that the VMware Cloud Director appliance has access to https://vapp-updates.vmware.com.
- Familiarize yourself with the backup procedure for the VMware Cloud Director appliance. See Back Up the Embedded Database of Your VMware Cloud Director Appliance.
Procedure
What to do next
- Verify that the upgrade is successful.
- Log in to the VMware Cloud Director Service Provider Admin Portal.
- Log in to the VMware Cloud Director appliance management UI and confirm that all the appliances appear with a
Healthy
status.
-
For each cell, verify that there are no add-on upgrade errors in vcloud-container-info.log.
- If there is a vamicli update --install latest command failure, see Installing the Latest Update of Your VMware Cloud Director Appliance Fails.
- If the upgrade is successful, you can delete the snapshot of the VMware Cloud Director appliance.
- If the upgrade is not successful, you can roll back the VMware Cloud Director appliance to the snapshot that you took before the upgrade. See Roll Back Your VMware Cloud Director Appliance When an Upgrade Fails.
- Starting with version 10.5.1, the VMware Cloud Director appliance adds the
SubjectKeyIdentifier
andAuthorityKeyIdentifier
certificate extensions to the self-signed certificates you generate. To generate self-signed certificates with theSubjectKeyIdentifier
andAuthorityKeyIdentifier
certificate extensions, see Renew Your VMware Cloud Director 10.5.0 Appliance Certificates.