Select an OS or OVA During Cluster Upgrade

This topic explains how to specify a target OS or OVA template for cluster nodes to run on when you upgrade a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) standalone management cluster or workload to a new version of TKG.

Select an OS to Upgrade To

If your IaaS account has multiple base VM images with the same version of Kubernetes that you are upgrading to, your tanzu mc upgrade or tanzu cluster upgrade command can specify which OS version to use.

You specify the OS version with the --os-arch, --os-name, or --os-version options to the upgrade command. For example, on vSphere if you have uploaded both Photon and Ubuntu OVA templates with Kubernetes v1.28.11, specify --os-name ubuntu to upgrade your cluster to run on an Ubuntu VM.

Possible values and defaults for these options include:

--os-name values include ubuntu (default) or photon for Photon OS
--os-version value depends on os-name:
- ubuntu values include: 22.04 (default), 20.04
- photon values include: 5 (default), 3
--os-arch value: amd64 (default)

If you do not specify an --os-name when upgrading a cluster, its nodes retain their existing --os-name setting.

Important
If you are upgrading a legacy plan-based workload cluster to Kubernetes v1.28, you must specify the --os-name, --os-version, and --os-arch options in the tanzu cluster upgrade command. For more information, see Upgrade Workload Clusters.

Select an OVA Template to Upgrade To

On vSphere, you can use the --vsphere-vm-template-name option to tanzu mc upgrade or tanzu cluster upgrade to specify an OVA file in your vCenter inventory to upgrade cluster nodes to.

Specify the OVA template using its vCenter inventory path, the same way that you set VSPHERE_TEMPLATE in a cluster configuration file, as described in Deploy a Cluster with a Custom OVA Image.

For example:

tanzu cluster upgrade CLUSTER-NAME --vsphere-vm-template-name "/TKG_DC/vm/TKG_IMAGES/ubuntu-2204-kube-v1.28.11-vmware.1"