Last week VMware announced the official release of vCloud Director 9. Ever since hearing about this release at VMworld 2017, I’ve been excited about having the chance to give it a run in production. There are already some great blog posts out there now on the latest features. The other night I decided to upgrade from vCD 8.10 to vCD 9 during a maintenance window. The upgrade process was extremely straight forward and just about on par with all the other upgrades in the vCD 8.X series.
To start, I downloaded the new code from VMware support and uploaded it to a temp folder on my vCloud director cells.
From a SSH session on all cells, I made sure the code had executable rights
After making sure that there no jobs running in vCD, and of course taking snapshots of the cells in vSphere, I proceeded with running the executable. It detected an older version of vCD currently running and asked if I would like to upgrade to vCD 9.
The code stopped the vCD cell and installed the update. Once it was complete, the familiar warning about upgrading the database schema before starting the vmware-vcd service appeared. At this point I updated the other vCD cells using the same procedure. Once the final cell was updated, I ran the database schema upgrade. On the initial run, it detected that two of the cells were not in a suitable state for upgrade.
I gave it a few minutes, re-ran the command, and it finally detected that the cells were now suitable and proceeded with the database upgrade. Once it finished, it prompted to start up the vCD service, which I also manually performed on the other cells using “service vmware-vcd start”.
Once all cells were started, I was able to verify that vCD was now running version 9 as expected.
I also tested the new HTML 5 tenant portal, which is one of the new features that is widely being touted for this release. It is accessible by tacking on “/tenant/{org name}” at the end of the vCD portal URL.
I definitely love all of the new HTML 5 interfaces VMware has been releasing, and I only hope a fully functional HTML 5 vCD admin interface will follow soon.
The only snag I ran into had to do with the Citrix Netscalers we use to load balance our vCD portal. After the upgrade, I was unable to access vCD via the virtual IP address of our load balanced service. I could hit the vCD cells directly, so I had to point our public DNS record to just one cell temporarily until I fixed the Netscaler issue. I did finally get that working, and that fix will be the topic of my next post later this week.
