Upgrade VMware vRealize Operations 6.2 to 6.6

Overview:

The VMware vRealize Operations deliver intelligent operations management from applications to infrastructure across physical, virtual and cloud environments. It delivers heterogeneous and highly scalable performance management with intuitive, actionable dashboards, sophisticated analytic and broad third-party extensibility, providing deep operational visibility and faster troubleshooting.

• Improves application performance, prevents business disruptions and makes IT more efficient. It improve performance, avoid disruption and proactively manage the Software-Defined Data-Centre (SDDC) with integrated performance and health monitoring from storage to applications with predictive analytic, smart alerts and guided remediation.
• Get unified management across heterogeneous data-centres and multiple public clouds. Simplify operations with comprehensive visibility in one place across applications, physical infrastructure components and public clouds, supported by an extensible platform utilizing third-party management packs.
• Optimize resource usage through reclamation and right sizing, cross-cluster workload placement and improved planning and forecasting. Enforce IT and configuration standards for an optimal infrastructure.
• If you are upgrading older versions of vRealize Operations Manager (6.0.x or 6.1) must use a two-step upgrade: First upgrade to vRealize Operations Manager 6.3.1 and then upgrade to vRealize Operations Manager 6.6.1. If you have a recent version of Realize Operations Manager (6.6, 6.5, 6.4, 6.3.1, 6.3, 6.2.1, or 6.2), you can upgrade directly to vRealize Operations Manager 6.6.1

Prerequisites:

• Ensure you are on the required network and have all the necessary credentials in place.
• To update your vRealize Operations Manager environment, you need to download the right PAK files for the clusters you wish to upgrade. Notice that only the Virtual appliance clusters use a PAK file like “vRealize_Operations_Manager-VA-6.6.1.6163035.pak” for core product update and another file for OS update “vRealize_Operations_Manager-VA-OS-6.6.1.6163035.pak”
• Host name entries in the /etc/hosts of each node might get reset when applying the OS update PAK file for an update so you can manually update the hosts file after completing the software update. (Good to keep a backup of these files)
• Before you begin the upgrade to vRealize Operations Manager, back up the changes to your custom alert definitions, symptom definitions, recommendations, and views by cloning them.
• You can backup and restore vRealize Operations Manager single or multi-node clusters by using vSphere Data Protection or other backup tools. You can perform full, differential, and incremental backups and restores of virtual machines.
• Perform the upgrade at a time when the system has an approved downtime.

Notes:

• The installation might take several minutes or even a couple hours depending on the size and type of your clusters and nodes. You must complete the upgrade on one server before you begin an upgrade on another.
• If the deployment uses a load balancer, the first appliance you plan to upgrade must be connected to the load balancer. All other instances of vRealize Operation appliances must be disabled for load balancer traffic before you apply the upgrade to avoid caching errors.
• If the root password is 365 days old or older, we must change the password before we run the upgrade. If a root password is 364 days old or newer, we can proceed with the upgrade (#chage –l)

Procedure:

• Navigate to the vRealize Operations Manager administration interface (one by one).
  • Example: "https://myvrops1.lab.com/admin" and "https://myvrops2.lab.com/admin"
• Log in with the admin username and password for the master node.
• Click on the “Take offline” button to offline the vROPs cluster. Obviously this means downtime for vROPs and this may take some time to complete.
• You need to repeat the above steps for each node in the cluster if you have a HA cluster of VMware vRealize Operation nodes.
• Verify if all of the nodes are showing offline.
• Take a snapshot of each node in your vROPs cluster. Also ensure a successful recent backup is available, before the upgrade activity.
  • Open the vSphere client.
  • Right-click a vRealize Operations Manager virtual machine.
  • Click Snapshot and then click Take Snapshot.
  • Name the snapshot. Use a meaningful name such as "Pre-Update"
  • Uncheck the Snapshot the Virtual Machine Memory check box.
  • Uncheck the “Ensure Quiesce Guest File System” check box (to use this feature it needs VMware Tools to be pre-installed)
  • Repeat these steps for each node in the cluster.

Notes: 

• If there is any OS update/patch is needed then do it first and reboot the appliances one by on.
  • The file name will look like "vRealize_Operations_Manager-VA-OS-xxx.pak"
• If this OS update/patch is not needed then you can directly go to next step to upgrade the core appliance.
  • The file name will look like "vRealize_Operations_Manager-VA-xxx.pak"

Appliance OS Update: (Step-1)

• Log into the vRealize Operations Manager Administrator interface.
• On the left, click Software Update.
• Click Install a Software Update.
• Locate the ".pak" file for the OS update “vRealize_Operations_Manager-VA-OS-6.6.1. 6163035.pak"
• Do not choose “Reset out-of-the-box content” option at this stage.
• Click Upload. Once complete, read the warning messages (about the appliance restart) and click next.
• Accept EULA and click next twice & finally click install. The vROPS virtual appliance OS upgrade install with begin.
• Once the OS install is complete, the appliance will restart and would prompt you to login back to the admin page.
• Login back to the Admin page and wait for the vROPS services to become online.
• Go to the Software Update section and ensure that the OS update is successfully completed.

vROPs Core Software Product / Appliance Update:  (Step-2)

• Log into the vRealize Operations Manager Administrator interface.
• Go to Software Update and click on install a software update and locate the ".pak" file for the core product update “vRealize_Operations_Manager-VA-6.6.1.6163035.pak“
• If needed then only click Reset default content check box and click upload (optional)
• We can choose to “Reset out-of-the-box content” if we want to return alerts, symptoms, recommendations, and policies back to the default configuration.
• This overwrites any user modifications. It’s suggested not to choose this option at all.
• Once uploaded and staged on the appliance, ensure that the new version (to be upgraded to) is appearing correctly and click next.
• Accept EULA and click next twice and then click install.
• During the install stage, you will be automatically logged out of the admin interface and will be prompted to log back in.
• Log back in to the admin interface and wait until the software update completes. This stage can be little more time consuming.
• Once completed, go to System Status section and verify that the vROPS version 6.6 is showing successfully.
• Now vROPS upgrade has successfully completed for the cluster / node.
• If you have multiple nodes in your vROPS cluster, you need to repeat this process for each node.
• Also do remember to remove the snapshot if all operations are normal, after a while.
• Now you can see all your views, dashboards etc.

Troubleshooting (Optional):

In case the cluster didn’t came online after some time, please follow the below listed troubleshooting procedure and wait for 10-15 minutes.

• Restart the Services in vRealize Operation Appliance(s) in Below Listed Order:
  • service vmware-casa status
  • service vmware-casa restart
  • service vmware-vcops status
  • service vmware-vcops restart
  • Service vmware-vcops-web status
  • Service vmware-vcops-web restart

Post Upgrade Tasks:

• After finishing an upgrade in a vROPS high availability deployment, you must configure the load balancer to pass traffic to the vRealize Operations Appliance.
• SSH to vROPS appliance and check if all of their core services are running.
• Login to vROPS portal and check if all the nodes are online and if the data is receiving for all the configured solutions.
• Check all the log files for any errors.
• Monitor the health of vRealize Operations environment for some time.

Resolved Issues from Previous Releases:

This section contains previous known issues that are resolved in this release.

• Enabling pDRS results in a message similar to the following, when the corresponding python adapter instance might have stopped. Failed to configure predictive DRS. Please close the Manage Solution Window and try again.