Before you upgrade NSX, perform the pre-upgrade tasks to ensure that the upgrade is successful.

Procedure

  1. NSX checks the upgrade readiness of your NSX Manager nodes as part of the upgrade pre-check. For more information on the readiness check, see the VMware knowledge base article at https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/87379.
  2. Ensure that your transport node profiles have the appropriate transport zones added to them. NSX Manager may not display the list of transport node profiles if any of the transport node profiles do not have transport zones added to them.
  3. Ensure that you backup the NSX Manager before you start the upgrade process. See the NSX Administration Guide.
  4. Ensure that your host OS is supported for NSX Manager. See Supported Hosts for NSX Managers in the NSX Administration Guide
  5. Disable automatic backups before you start the upgrade process. See the NSX Administration Guide for more information on configuring backups.
  6. Terminate any active SSH sessions or local shell scripts that may be running on the NSX Manager or the NSX Edge nodes, before you begin the upgrade process.
  7. Ensure that the appropriate communication ports are open from the Transport and Edge nodes to the NSX Manager nodes. For more information on ports, see https://ports.esp.vmware.com/home/NSX.
  8. You need a valid license to use licensed features like T0, T1, Segments, and NSX intelligence. Ensure that you have a valid license.
  9. Delete all expired user accounts before you begin upgrade. Upgrade for NSX on vSphere fails if your exception list for vSphere lockdown mode includes expired user accounts. If your host is part of the vLCM-enabled cluster, several users such as lldp-vim-user, nsx-user, mux-user, and da-user, are created automatically and added to the exception users list on an ESXi host when NSX VIBS are installed. For more information on accounts with access privileges in lockdown mode, see Specifying Accounts with Access Privileges in Lockdown Mode in the vSphere Security Guide. For more details on these NSX user accounts on the ESXi host, refer to the KB article, https://ikb.vmware.com/s/article/87795.
  10. Ensure that you have the supported hardware version for your NSX Edge VMs. For more information, see https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/88934.
  11. Upgrading NSX Cloud components to 4.2 and later is not available. If you are using NSX Cloud for your public cloud workload VMs, remove all NSX Cloud components before proceeding with the upgrade. Undeploy NSX Cloud configurations as described in the NSX Installation Guide available at https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-NSX/4.1/installation/GUID-1C05DFE0-629E-40A9-A331-F06ED4D5CFC0.html.
    Important: NSX Manager upgrade is not allowed when NSX Cloud components are present.