This checklist contains important preparation steps that you must follow before beginning to upgrade VMware Tanzu Operations Manager and VMware Tanzu Application Service for VMs (TAS for VMs) from v2.9 to v3.0. If you do not follow these instructions, you may jeopardize your existing deployment data and cause the upgrade to fail.

VMware recommends upgrading directly to Tanzu Operations Manager v3.0 from Tanzu Operations Manager v2.5 through v2.9. To upgrade directly to Tanzu Operations Manager v3.0 from Tanzu Operations Manager v2.5 through v2.9, see Jump Upgrade from Tanzu Operations Manager v2.5 Through v2.9 in Upgrading Tanzu Operations Manager.

Although you can skip minor versions when upgrading Tanzu Operations Manager, do not skip minor versions when upgrading TAS for VMs. Skipping minor versions when upgrading TAS for VMs might result in additional breaking changes. To avoid this, upgrade TAS for VMs to the minor version that directly follows your current version of TAS for VMs. For more information, see Upgrade TAS for VMs in Upgrading Tanzu Operations Manager.

Any certificate rotation must be completed before upgrading Tanzu Operations Manager. Failure to complete the CA rotation results in the inability to Apply Changes due to safety violations.

Back up your Tanzu Operations Manager deployment

VMware recommends backing up your Tanzu Operations Manager deployment before upgrading, to restore in the case of failure. To do this, follow the instructions in Backing up Deployments with BBR.

Find your decryption passphrase for Tanzu Operations Manager

To complete the Tanzu Operations Manager upgrade, you must have your Tanzu Operations Manager decryption passphrase. You defined this decryption passphrase during the initial installation of Tanzu Operations Manager.

Review changes in Tanzu Operations Manager and TAS for VMs v6.0

Review each of the following links to understand the changes in the new release, such as new features, known issues, and breaking changes.

Check VMware NSX-T Data Center version

For vSphere deployments, the vSphere BOSH CPI that is included in Tanzu Operations Manager v3.0 no longer supports NSX-T v2.2 and earlier. If you are using NSX-T v2.2 or earlier, you must upgrade NSX-T to a supported version.

The specific version of NSX-T required for your deployment depends on which runtime you plan to deploy and integrate with NSX-T.

Update tiles and add-ons

These sections describe changes you must make to your product tiles and add-ons before upgrading Tanzu Operations Manager.

Review service tile compatibility

Before you upgrade, check whether the service tiles that you currently have are compatible with the new version of Tanzu Operations Manager.

To check all the service tiles in your current Tanzu Operations Manager deployment, and how to use Upgrade Planner, see Upgrade Planner.

Alternatively, you can do the following:

  1. Go to the tile’s download page on the Broadcom Support portal.

  2. Search for the tile you want to check, and click the name of the tile.

  3. Click the tile version on the Release list.

  4. Select I agree to Terms and Conditions.

  5. Download the compressed file. Review the documentation and release notes online.

If the currently-deployed version of a tile is not compatible with Tanzu Operations Manager v3.0, you must upgrade the tile to a compatible version before you upgrade Tanzu Operations Manager. You do not need to upgrade tiles that are compatible with both Tanzu Operations Manager v2.9 and v3.0.

Some Partner service tiles might be incompatible with Tanzu Operations Manager v3.0. For information about Partner service tile compatibility, see the tile release documentation in the Broadcom Support portal, or contact the Partner organization that produces the service tile.

Environment details

You can use the following empty table as a template for recording and tracking the tile versions that you have deployed in all of your environments.

Sandbox Non-Prod Prod Other
Tanzu Operations Manager Tanzu Operations Manager
VMware Tanzu Application Service for VMs
Tanzu Operations Manager Services VMware Tanzu for MySQL on Cloud Foundry
Valkey (formerly Redis)
RabbitMQ for VMware Tanzu [VMs]
Single Sign-On for VMware Tanzu (SSO)
Spring Cloud Services for VMware Tanzu
Concourse
…
Tanzu Operations Manager Partner Services New Relic
…

Upgrade services tiles

Upgrade all service tiles to versions that are compatible with Tanzu Operations Manager v3.0. Service tiles are add-on products you install alongside your runtime. For example, VMware Tanzu SQL [MySQL for VMs], Healthwatch, and RabbitMQ for VMware Tanzu [VMs] are service tiles.

Do not upgrade runtime tiles, such as TAS for VMs, TAS for VMs [Windows], or TKGI at this time.

To verify version compatibility, see Upgrade Planner and the service tile documentation.

Configure BOSH Director

With each release of a new Tanzu Operations Manager version, BOSH Director might require updates before upgrading to the new version. For actions to take before upgrading to Tanzu Operations Manager v3.0, see the following sections.

Check required machine specifications

Check the required machine specifications for Tanzu Operations Manager v3.0. These specifications are specific to your IaaS. If these specifications do not match your existing Tanzu Operations Manager deployment, modify the values of your Tanzu Operations Manager VM instance. For example, if the boot disk of your existing Tanzu Operations Manager deployment is 50 GB and the new Tanzu Operations Manager deployment requires 100 GB, increase the size of your Tanzu Operations Manager boot disk to 100 GB.

Configure TAS for VMs

With each release of a new Tanzu Operations Manager version, TAS for VMs might require updates before upgrading to the new version. For more information, see the following sections for what action to take before upgrading to Tanzu Operations Manager v3.0.

Deactivate hostname validation for external databases on GCP and Azure

This pre-upgrade step applies only to existing TAS for VMs v2.9 deployments where both of these conditions are met:

  • In the Databases pane, TAS for VMs v2.9 is configured to use an external GCP or Azure database.

  • In TAS for VMs 3.0 and beyond, you want to use the same external GCP or Azure database configured in the Databases pane.

  • You enabled TLS communication for the GCP or Azure external database by adding a certificate authority (CA) certificate to the Database CA certificate field in the Databases pane.

If you meet these conditions, you must deactivate hostname validation before you upgrade to TAS for VMs 3.0 and beyond. Failure to deactivate hostname validation can cause the upgrade to fail for deployments that use external databases on GCP or Azure.

To deactivate hostname validation:

  1. After you stage TAS for VMs for upgrade, go to the Databases pane in the TAS for VMs tile.

  2. Deactivate the Require hostname verification check box. By default, this check box is activated.

For more information about database configuration in TAS for VMs 6.0, see the TAS for VMs documentation.

(Optional) Deactivate unused errands

To save upgrade time, you can deactivate unused TAS for VMs post-deploy errands. For more information, see Post-Deploy Errands in Errands. Only deactivate these errands if your environment does not need them.

In some cases, if you have previously deactivated lifecycle errands for any installed product to reduce deployment time, you might want to activate these errands again before upgrading. For more information, see Add and import products in Adding and Deleting Products.

Check OS compatibility of BOSH-managed add-ons and tiles

Before upgrading to Tanzu Operations Manager v3.0, operators who have deployed any BOSH-managed add-ons such as IPsec, Anti-Virus, or File Integrity Monitoring and who have deployed or are planning to deploy TAS for VMs [Windows] must modify the add-on manifest to specify a compatible OS stemcell. For more information, see the TAS for VMs [Windows] documentation.

For example, File Integrity Monitor (FIM) is not supported on Windows. Therefore, the manifest must use an include directive to specify the target OS stemcell of ubuntu-xenial and ubuntu-jammy.

To upgrade to a Jammy stemcell, see the documentation for each add-on and follow the instructions.

To update an add-on manifest:

  1. Locate your add-on manifest file. For example, for FIM, locate the fim.yml you uploaded to the Tanzu Operations Manager VM.

  2. Modify the manifest to include the following include directive to your manifest:

      include:
    stemcell:
      - os: ubuntu-xenial
      - os: ubuntu-jammy

  3. Upload the modified manifest file to your Tanzu Operations Manager deployment. For instructions, see Installing file integrity monitoring on BOSH Director in the File Integrity Monitoring documentation.

If you use any other BOSH-managed add-ons in your deployment, verify OS compatibility for those components as well. For more information about configuring BOSH add-on manifests, see Addons Block.

Check certificate authority expiration dates

Depending on the requirements of your deployment, you might need to rotate your certificate authority (CA) certificates. The non-configurable certificates in your deployment expire every two years. You must regenerate and rotate them so that critical components do not face an outage.

To retrieve information about all the RSA and CA certificates for the BOSH Director and other products in your deployment, you can run the following using the Tanzu Operations Manager API: GET /api/v0/deployed/certificates?expires_within=TIME

expires_within is optional, and valid values are:

  • d for days
  • w for weeks
  • m for months
  • y for years

For example, to search for certificates expiring within one month, run:

curl "https://OPS-MANAGER-FQDN/api/v0/deployed/certificates?expires_within=1m" \
 -X GET \
 -H "Authorization: Bearer UAA-ACCESS-TOKEN"

Where:

  • OPS-MANAGER-FQDN is the fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) of your Tanzu Operations Manager deployment.
  • UAA-ACCESS-TOKEN is your UAA access token.

For information about regenerating and rotating CA certificates, see Overview of certificate rotation.

Check the capacity of your deployment

These sections describe steps for ensuring your deployment has adequate capacity to perform the upgrade.

Confirm adequate disk space

Confirm that the BOSH Director VM has adequate disk space for your upgrades. You need at least 20 GB of free disk space to upgrade Tanzu Operations Manager and TAS for VMs. If you plan to upgrade other products, the amount of disk space required depends on how many tiles you plan to deploy to your upgraded Tanzu Operations Manager deployment.

To check current persistent disk usage:

  1. Go to Tanzu Operations Manager Installation Dashboard.

  2. Click the BOSH Director tile.

  3. Click the Status tab.

  4. Check the value of the PERSISTENT DISK TYPE column. If persistent disk usage is higher than 50%:

    1. Click the Settings tab.
    2. Click Resource Config.
    3. Increase your persistent disk space to handle the size of the resources. If you do not know how much disk space to allocate, set the value to at least 100 GB.

Check Diego Cell RAM and disk

Check that Diego Cells have sufficient available RAM and disk capacity to support app containers.

The KPIs that monitor these these resources are:

  • rep.CapacityRemainingMemory
  • rep.CapacityRemainingDisk

Adjust Diego Cell limits

If needed, adjust the maximum number of Diego Cells that the platform can upgrade simultaneously, to avoid overloading the other Diego Cells. For more information, see Limit component instance restarts.

The maximum number of Diego Cells that can update at once, max_in_flight, is 4%. This setting is configured in the BOSH manifest, in the Diego Cell definition. For more information, see Prevent overload.

For more information about these KPIs, see Diego Cell metrics.

Review file storage IOPS and other upgrade limiting factors

During the Tanzu Operations Manager upgrade process, a large quantity of data is moved around on disk.

To ensure a successful upgrade of your deployment, verify that your underlying TAS for VMs file storage is performant enough to handle the upgrade. For more information about the configurations to evaluate, see Configure file storage.

In addition to file storage IOPS, consider additional existing deployment factors that can impact overall upgrade duration and performance:

Factor Impact
Network latency Network latency can contribute to how long it takes to move app instance data to new containers.
Number of ASGs A large number of App Security Groups (ASGs) in your deployment can contribute to an increase in app instance container startup time. For more information, see App Security Groups in the TAS for VMs documentation.
Number of app instances and app growth A large increase in the number of app instances and average droplet size since the initial deployment can increase the upgrade impact on your system.

Run BOSH clean-up

To clean up old stemcells, releases, orphaned disks, and other resources before upgrade, run:

bosh -e ALIAS clean-up --all

Where ALIAS is your BOSH deployment alias.

This cleanup helps prevent the product and stemcell upload process from exceeding the BOSH Director’s available persistent disk space.

Check the health of your deployment

These sections describe steps for ensuring your deployment is healthy before you perform the upgrade.

Collect foundation health status

For collecting foundation health status, VMware recommends using Healthwatch, which monitors the current health, performance, and capacity of your Tanzu Operations Manager deployment, and generates alerts. For more information, see the Healthwatch documentation.

If you are not using Healthwatch, you can do some or all of the following to collect foundation health status:

  • If your Tanzu Operations Manager deployment has external metrics monitoring set up, verify that VM CPU, RAM, and disk use levels are within reasonable levels.

  • Check your system status.

    • To check the status of your BOSH instances, run:

      bosh -e ALIAS -d DEPLOYMENT-NAME instances --ps

      Where:

      • ALIAS is your BOSH deployment alias.
      • DEPLOYMENT-NAME is the name of the BOSH deployment with the instances you want to check.

        Running bosh instances with the flags --ps, --vitals, or --failing reveals individual job failure.

    • To check the status of your BOSH VMs, run:

      bosh -e ALIAS vms --vitals

      Where ALIAS is your BOSH deployment alias.

      This command reveals VMs with high CPU, high memory, high disk utilization, and those with a state other than running.

    • To check the status of your BOSH cloud config, run:

      bosh -e ALIAS -d DEPLOYMENT-NAME cck --report

      Where:

      • ALIAS is your BOSH deployment alias.
      • DEPLOYMENT-NAME is the name of the BOSH deployment with the cloud config you want to check.

  • Check the Status tab of each TAS for VMs tile for VM CPU, RAM, and disk use levels.

  • Check that Tanzu Operations Manager persistent disk usage is less than 50%. If not, follow the procedure in Confirm Adequate Disk Space.

  • (Optional) Check the logs for errors before proceeding with the upgrade. For more information, see the TAS for VMs documentation.

Validate MySQL cluster health

If you are running TAS for VMs MySQL as a cluster, run the mysql-diag tool to validate health of the cluster.

For BOSH CLI v2 instructions, see the TAS for VMs documentation.

Review pending and recent changes

To review pending and recent changes:

  1. Confirm that there are no outstanding changes in Tanzu Operations Manager or any other tile. All tiles must be green. If all tiles are not green, click Review Pending Changes, then click Apply Changes.

  2. After applying changes, click Recent Install Logs to confirm that the changes completed cleanly. You must see the following output:

    Cleanup complete
{"type": "step_finished", "id": "clean_up_bosh.cleaning_up"}
Exited with 0.

Export your installation

To export your installation:

  1. In Tanzu Operations Manager Installation Dashboard, click the account drop-down and menu and select Settings.

  2. On the Settings page, click Export Installation Settings, then click Export Installation Settings.

This exports the current Tanzu Operations Manager installation with all of its assets.

When you export an installation, the export contains the base VM images, necessary packages, and configuration settings, but does not include releases between upgrades if Tanzu Operations Manager has already uploaded to BOSH. When backing up your deployment, you must take this into account by backing up the BOSH blobstore that contains the uploaded releases. BOSH Backup and Restore (BBR) backs up the BOSH blobstore. For more information, see Backing up Deployments with BBR.

  • The export time depends on the size of the exported file.

  • Some browsers do not provide feedback on the status of the export process and might appear to hang.

Some operating systems automatically unzip the exported installation. If this occurs, create a ZIP file of the unzipped export. Do not start compressing at the "installation" folder level. Instead, start compressing at the level containing the rails_database_dump.postgres file.

Next steps

After you have completed the Upgrade Preparation Checklist, continue to Upgrading Tanzu Operations Manager.

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