Lifecycle management design details the design decisions covering the lifecycle management of the Advanced Load Balancing for VMware Cloud Foundation validated solution.

When performing lifecycle management of the NSX Advanced Load Balancer you should consider the amount of time and effort taken to perform a patch, update, or upgrade operation, and the impact these operations may have on the configured load-balanced applications.

You perform lifecycle management of the NSX Advanced Load Balancer using the Controller upgrade workflow. The Controllers will upgrade all the NSX Advanced Load Balancer components including the Controllers and the associated Service Engines.

NSX Advanced Load Balancer supports two methods of updating the system:

  1. Upgrade: Used for regular upgrades

  2. Patch: Used for hot fixes

Customers can choose to apply the following methodology while updating the NSX Advanced Load Balancer:

  1. Full System Update: The Controllers and all the associated Service Engines are updated together in a single maintenance window.

    1. Allowed in both basic and enterprise license tiers.

    2. All associated Service Engines are updated along with the Controllers.

  2. Separate Control and Data Plane Update: The Controllers and all the associated Service Engines can be updated separately in multiple maintenance windows.

    1. Only allowed in the Enterprise License Tier.

    2. The Controllers (Control Plane Only) must be updated first.

    3. All associated Service Engines need to be updated to complete the upgrade sequence.

    4. The Service Engine updated can be done on a per Service Engine Group basis.

Rollbacks with NSX Advanced Load Balancer

  • Rollback is automatically triggered if there is a failure during the control plane upgrade.

  • Customers can choose to rollback the system at will if desired for reasons that are outside the scope of this guidance.

  • Before executing a rollback, you need to delete all the Service Engine Groups that were created after upgrade (in the current release).

  • Only a single step rollback is possible, current release to previous release.

Table 1. Design Decisions for Lifecycle Management of the VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer

Decision ID

Design Decision

Design Justification

Design Implication

AVI-CTLR-027

Use the Controller to performance lifecycle management of the NSX Advanced Load Balancer.

  • Lifecycle of NSX Advanced Load Balancer is not managed by SDDC Manager.

  • The Controller manages lifecycle for all NSX Advanced Load Balancer components including the Controllers and all the associated Service Engines.

Deployment, patching, updates, and upgrades of NSX Advanced Load Balancer are performed without native SDDC automation.

AVI-CTLR-028

When a VI workload domain is upgraded, upgrade NSX Advanced Load Balancer before upgrading NSX-T Data Center based on the compatibility matrix with vCenter Server and NSX-T Data Center.

Note:

Check the version compatibility matrix in the Advanced Load Balancing for VMware Cloud Foundation validated solution document before upgrading.

Ensures NSX Advanced Load Balancer cloud integration with NSX-T Data Center and vCenter Server continues to function as expected.

Note:

Upgrading vCenter Server and/ or NSX-T Data Center before NSX Advanced Load Balancer might lead to issues with the NSX-T Cloud Connector integration on the Controller due to version incompatibility.

None

AVI-CTLR-029

If the Controller is providing services to multiple VI workload domains, choose to upgrade the Controller and only the Service Engine Groups that are associated with the VI workload domain that is being upgraded.

Note:

This is optional. Alternatively, choose to upgrade the entire Controller cluster, which will upgrade the Controllers and all the Service Engines.

  • Allows isolated upgrade for the VI workload domain

  • Upgrade only the Service Engines that reside on the VI workload domain that is being upgraded

  • VI workload domain that is currently not being upgraded, but shares the same Controller is left untouched.

None