The management domain in your environment must be upgraded before you upgrade VI workload domains. In order to upgrade to VMware Cloud Foundation 4.4, all VI workload domains in your environment must be at VMware Cloud Foundation 4.1 or higher. If your environment is at a version lower than 4.1, you must upgrade the workload domains to 4.1 and then upgrade to 4.4.

Within a VI workload domain, components must be upgraded in the following order.
  1. NSX-T. See Upgrade NSX-T Data Center or Upgrade NSX-T Data Center for VMware Cloud Foundation in a Federated Environment.
    Note: NSX-T upgrade is not supported on a vSphere Lifecycle Manager image based stretched cluster. You must unstretch the cluster before proceeding with the upgrade.
  2. vCenter Server. See Upgrade vCenter Server.
  3. If you have stretched clusters in your environment, upgrade the vSAN witness host. See Upgrade vSAN Witness Host.
  4. ESXi. See Upgrade ESXi.
  5. Workload Management on clusters that have vSphere with Tanzu. Workload Management can be upgraded through vCenter Server. See Updating the vSphere with Tanzu Environment.
  6. If you had suppressed the Enter Maintenance Mode prechecks for ESXi or NSX, delete the following lines from the /opt/vmware/vcf/lcm/lcm-app/conf/application-prod.properties file and restart the LCM service:

    lcm.nsxt.suppress.dry.run.emm.check=true

    lcm.esx.suppress.dry.run.emm.check.failures=true

Post Upgrade Steps for NFS-Based Workload Domains

After upgrading VI workload domains, you must add a static route for hosts to access NFS storage over the NFS gateway. This process must be completed before expanding the workload domain.
  1. Identify the IP address NFS server for the workload domain.
  2. Identify the network pool associated with the hosts in the cluster and the NFS gateway for the network pool.
    1. Log in to SDDC Manager.
    2. Click Inventory > Workload Domains and then click the workload domain you are performing the post upgrade steps on.
    3. Click the Clusters tab and then click an NFS-based cluster.
    4. Click the Hosts tab and note down the network pool for the hosts.
    5. Click the Info icon next to the network pool name and note down the NFS gateway.
  3. Ensure that the NFS server is reachable from the NFS gateway. If a gateway does not exist, create it.
  4. Identify the vmknic on each host in the cluster that is configured for NFS traffic.
  5. Configure a static route on each host to reach the NFS server from the NFS gateway.

    esxcli network ip route ipv4 add -g NFS-gateway-IP -n NFS-gateway

  6. Verify that the new route is added to the host using the NFS vmknic

    esxcli network ip route ipv4 list

  7. Ensure that the hosts in the NFS cluster (nfs-cluster-1) can reach the NFS gateway (10.0.24.1) through the NFS vmkernel (vmk2) using the vmkping command.

    vmkping -4 -I vmk2 -s 1470 -d -W 5 10.0.22.250

  8. Repeat steps 2 through 7 for each cluster using NFS storage.