February 13, 2024
VMware Cloud Foundation: Manual Product Upgrades
Why You Shouldn’t Upgrade VMware NSX Manually
The Issue?
My VCF Troubleshooting guide has a few other tips for administrators.
Log back onto SDDC manager and su to root if you are not already logged on and run the following line of text.
Diagnosing The Issue
To further investigate, ssh onto SDDC Manager and su to root. Run the following line.
The release version in SDDC Manager shows each VCF release and the expected BOM for said release, in this case it is a 4.5 environment, and the relevant boxes have been highlighted. As there were some out of band updates, it seems to have caused an issue with SDDC Manager being able to recognize the domain release version, hence, a 0 instead of a 1.
It is important to understand the issues that arise from manual product upgrades, unless performed in a supported way or VMware support guidance. Whilst this article focussed on VMware NSX, it will likely be possible to perform similar operations for other solutions in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) stack.
curl localhost/inventory/entities/cb1de489-de2e-4e8e-8972-d87c22ebd250 -X PATCH -d '{"type":"NSXT_CLUSTER","status":"ACTIVE","version":"4.1.0.0.0.21332672"}' -H 'Content-Type:application/json'
You can see the version in the output above now reflects VMware NSX’s current version.
SDDC Manager upgrade prechecks are now successful.
Check out these links for all my other VCF articles and my recently published VCF course
Summary
curl localhost/inventory/nsxt | json_pp
It is important to understand the impacts of manually upgrading products in a VMware Cloud Foundation environment. In this article, VMware NSX was previously upgraded to a ‘non-VCF’ version, and caused lifecycle issues for the entire domain.
Unless you are upgrading in a supported manner, i.e. the async patch tool, then the official guidance is simple, do not upgrade any products outside of SDDC Manager. The screenshots below are what you will see if the versions do not match what is in the BOM and database on SDDC Manager. This is a NSX Federated environment, however, the error message will be the same for VMware NSX local managers.
