You can upgrade clusters that have vSphere Lifecycle Manager enabled.

Prerequisites

Verify that you have configured the overall hosts upgrade plan. See Configure Hosts.

Procedure

  1. For clusters set up as Stage in vSphere Lifecycle Manager, click Stage to copy the NSX vibs to vSphere Lifecycle Manager and to update the cluster with the new NSX image. Also stage the vibs for the solutions that you are upgrading along with NSX.
  2. Click Start to upgrade the hosts.
  3. For clusters set up as Stage in vSphere Lifecycle Manager, log in the vCenter Server and remediate the hosts.
    For clusters set up as NSX only Upgrade, the Upgrade Coordinator performs the entire upgrade process including the remediation of hosts.
    Note: While upgrading a DPU-backed ESXi host, the host reboots as part of host remediation.

    If the host fails to be placed in maintenance mode, you will need to manually power off all VMs and then retry the host upgrade.

  4. Click Refresh and monitor the upgrade process from NSX Manager.
    You can view the overall upgrade status and specific progress of each host upgrade unit group. The upgrade duration depends on the number of host upgrade unit groups you have in your environment.

    Wait until the in progress upgrade units are successfully upgraded. You can then pause the upgrade to configure the host upgrade unit group that is not upgraded and resume the upgrade.

  5. Click Run Post Checks to make sure that the upgraded hosts and NSX do not have any problems.
    Note: If a host upgrade unit failed to upgrade and you removed the host from NSX, refresh the upgrade coordinator to view all the successfully upgraded host upgrade units.

    If a host fails during the upgrade, reboot the host and try the upgrade again.

  6. After the upgrade is successful, verify that the latest version of NSX packages is installed.
    esxcli software vib list | grep nsx

What to do next

You can proceed with the upgrade only after the upgrade process finishes successfully. If some of the hosts are disabled, you must enable and upgrade them before you proceed. See Upgrading Management Plane.

If there are upgrade errors, you must resolve the errors. See Troubleshooting Upgrade Failures.