In a previous post I upgraded my vCloud Director 9.5 environment which had an SQL database over to a vCloud 9.7 Appliance with an embedded PostgreSQL database. The link for that can be found here.

To follow on from this I thought it was about time I upgraded this environment to vCloud Director 10. I put this post together to run you through how easy it was to upgrade the 9.7 appliance to version 10.

First off before we begin the upgrade its important to take a snapshot of the appliance. To do this shutdown the appliance from vCenter and then take a snapshot. Once complete power vCloud Director back on.

If you have multiple vCloud Cells then log into one of the appliances on port 5480 to identify which is the primary appliance (write that down) as we will need to use this cell later on to back up the database.

The current version of vCloud Director in my lab is 9.7.0.13634630

Next up download the update package from VMware. Look for VMware vCloud Director 10.0.0–Virtual Appliance update package for 10.0.0 heading and below that you should see a .gz file. At the time of downloading this the build number was 14638910 so the file name was VMware_vCloud_Director_10.0.0.4471-14638910_update.tar.gz

Next up use putty to ssh to your vCloud Director Appliance and run the following command,

mkdir /tmp/local-update-package

Then copy the update package to the newly created local-update-package directory on the appliance. To do this I just used winscp and connected to the appliance and transferred the file.

Now extract the package in the local-update-package directory by running the following command,

tar -zxf VMware_vCloud_Director_10.0.0.4471-14638910_update.tar.gz

Next we need to set the newly created local-update-package directory as our update repository for the appliance. To do this run the following command,

vamicli update –repo file:///tmp/local-update-package

Now let’s check that it has set our new directory as the local update repository. To do this run,

vamicli update –check

You should see an output similar to the image below, it should show the package we downloaded as an available update.

Then shutdown the vCloud Director cell by running the following command,

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/cell-management-tool -u administrator cell –shutdown

You will be prompted for the administrator password.

Next lets kick off the upgrade, to do so run the following command,

vamicli update –install latest

If you have multiple cells then you will need to complete all of the previous steps on each cell before upgrading the database.

Next up we need to back up the database, if you on have the one cell then this is easy. If you have more than one then as I mentioned earlier you can identify which is the primary by connecting to the cell ip on port 5480. To back up the database we need to be connected to the primary cell before running the following command,

/opt/vmware/appliance/bin/create-db-backup

Now let’s complete the database upgrade, this can be run from any cell.

/opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/upgrade

You will be prompted with “Do you wish to upgrade the product now?” Enter Y to continue with the upgrade.

During the process it will ask if you have taken a backup of the database, to continue enter yes to continue here also.

Once complete it will prompt you to start the cell, enter y to start the services

You will then need to restart each of the cells after the upgrade is complete, to do this run the following command,

shutdown -r now

Once the vCloud Director cell has rebooted you will then be able to login to your newly upgraded appliance.

Then if you click on the drop down menu and select About you will see the newly upgraded version.

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