In this post I will upgrade a vCloud Director 9.7 Appliance to vCloud Director 10.

Preparation

Before starting, log into the vCD 9.7 appliance and check that everything is working as expected and that there are no errors that need to be resolved.
There are two organisations in the current vCD Instance. Before any update a full backup and snapshot is taken.

After checking the provider interface, log into the VAMI on port 5480 in order to check which appliance is the primary for hosting the Postgres DB. In this case it is a lab and I only have one appliance. This information is important if you have more than one appliance.

Having checked the details of the environment we can download the latest version of the update file making sure that this is compatible.

Following the download using WINSCP. Copy this up to a new directory created on each cell: /tmp/update

With the file in place, login into the Appliance with SSH and unpack the recently uploaded file

tar -zxf VMware_vCloud_Director_10.1.1.4916-16288798_update.tar.gz /tmp/update

then set the /tmp/update directory as the update repository

vamicli	update --repo file:///tmp/update

Once complete check for updates to ensure that the update file has been picked up

vamicli update --check

As you can see in the screenshot below the update package is detected as an Available Update.

Update

When ready and with any downtime confirmed we can shutdown vCloud Director services

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

Once complete run the upgrade using

vamicli update --install latest

In this lab as mentioned there is only one cell in the vCD instance so we can proceed to update the DB. If there were more cells it would be required to repeat the steps above on all cells before proceeding.

Run the following command to carry out the DB update

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

As you can see from the screenshot below there were some warnings regarding the cell not being ready. This is OK as the cell upgrade proceeded quickly and it hadn’t been detected that the cell was safe for upgrade.

There was also a warning about the schema in the DB but again due to one cell that was already shutdown it was OK to proceed in this case.

The update to the DB will progress and once finished you can restart the services. Here we chose to reboot by running

shutdown -r now

Validation

After a few minutes once the cell starts and the services loaded, log into the provider interface and check all is as expected.

https://sto-vcd01.terataki.local/provider

Once logged in to the HTML5 interface we can see that the old settings are there and that the Organisations are still present and correct.

Checking the ‘About’ information confirms that the update has been successful. The snapshot taken before upgrade can now be deleted.

Documentation

Official documentation on upgrading vCloud Director can be found on the VMware website