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 Cloud Director back on.

If you have multiple Cloud Cell’s 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 Cloud Director in my lab is 10.1.2.16779297

Then download the appliance update package from VMware.

Next up use putty to ssh to your Cloud 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.

Then browse to the newly created directory cd /tmp/local-update-package

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

tar -zxf VMware_Cloud_Director_10.2.0.5190-17029810_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 like the image below, it should show the package we downloaded as an available update.

Then shutdown the Cloud 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 let’s kick off the upgrade, to do so run the following command,

vamicli update – -install latest

If you have multiple cell’s 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 only 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 Cloud 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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