Upgrading vCSA 6.7 to vCSA 7.0

First thing, first: backup vCSA 6.7. Use a backup solution or do a vCenter backup from VAMI. It's never bad to have one, even though you will see that it can be skipped.

Next, mount the ISO and start the installer UI. The UI presents the already known options: install, upgrade, migrate, restore. My target is to upgrade existing lab environment so, I am choosing upgrade. Before going further into the post, I want to clarify the upgrade process. It is not an in place upgrade, it is actually a migration and you will end up with a new VM running vCSA 7.0 alongside the old vCSA 6.7.

I don't intend to describe the step by step upgrade since there are already a few good blog posts and the process itself is pretty straight forward. I will however highlight some things I came across during the upgrade.

• you will end up with 2 VMs - a powered off old vCSA 6.7 and a powered on vCSA 7.0
• vCSA 7.0 will preserve in the end FQDN and IP of vCSA 6.7
• a temporary IP address is required for vCSA 7.0 to be used during the data migration from vCSA 6.7 (that moment in time when both VMs are up and running)
• it's a 2 stage process: first a new vCSA VM is deployed, then the data is migrated
• migration offers possibility to chose how much data you actually want transferred (the more you choose, the longer it takes)
• configuration and inventory 
• configuration, inventory, tasks and events 
• configuration, inventory, tasks, events and performance metrics

• the whole process took almost 2 hours (my lab), expect bigger times for real environments

During the upgrade itself I got a couple of warning at pre-check and a couple of notifications at the end for the rest being smooth and uneventful. The warning was about not having DRS enabled on my cluster, which was fine because I had a single node cluster where vCSA was running:

The notifications is about  TLS 1.0 and 1.1 being disabled and Auto-Deploy needing an update:

I did try to upgrade using CLI installer, however there are some issues with the upgrade templates and its schema in the GA version (15843807) and it kept on failing during JSON template precheck. I will come back to this topic once I figure it out.

PowerCLI - Batch migrate VM network adapter

Back to VMware basic operational tasks: I had to migrate VMs from one network to another, which roughly translates to changing the portgoups Pretty simple and straightforward. Since the task was for several VMs, I automatically excluded clicking through the UI. That sent me to PowerCLI and now the simple task became a bit more complicated because instead on relying in real time on my hand-eye coordination for changing a portgroup, I would have to rely on an input file.

The input file is in CSV format and has four columns: VM name, source portgroup, destination portgroup and reboot (boolean value to see if reboot the VM or not). You may ask why using the source portgroup as input - I am using it to check that the VM actually has one network adapter connected to that portgroup and I am not randomly migrating everything I find on that VM.

The CSV file looks like this:
vmName,srcPg,dstPg,reboot
vm-1abc*,pg-prod-101,pg-prod-110,false
vm-2def*,pg-prod-101,pg-prod-110,false

I am also using wildcards in the name of the VMs. The reason behind this is the VMs have a very long and randomly generated name which is different from the hostname. For example, actual VM name is vm-1abc-yetcg-93763-andbv-34781, while hostname is vm-1abc. How I am checking that the wildcard does not match multiple VMs, you will see in the description below.

The migration script does the following:

1. takes as input the CSV file and tries to load and read the CSV file; if it fails, it will exit the execution
2. for each line in the CSV file it searches the VM in vCenter server inventory
3. once the VM has been uniquely identified, it searches for a network adapter connected to source portgroup as defined in input file; it doesn't find it or finds multiple portgroups, it does not process the VM
4. once the source portgroup is identified it changes the network adapter mapping to destination portgroup (as defined in input file)
5. if reboot is required, it will issue a soft reboot to the VM
6. and it goes to the next VM in the list

And now the code: as usual, please use it carefully as it has not been tested for all situations. Also, PowerCLI session from where the script will be run needs to be connected to vCenter Server as the script does not handle this. 

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param( [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][string]$csvVmList ) function VmChangeNetwork($vmName,$srcPg,$dstPg,$reboot){ Write-Host "processing:" $vmName Write-Host " src PG:" $srcPg "dst PG:" $dstPg "reboot required:" $reboot Try { $v = Get-VM | Where {$_.Name -like "$vmName"} } Catch { Write-Host $_.Exception.Message $_.Exception.ItemName } if ($v.Count -eq 1){ $srcPgExist = $v | Get-NetworkAdapter | Where {$_.NetworkName -eq $srcPg} if ($srcPgExist.Count -eq 1) { $v | Get-NetworkAdapter | Where {$_.NetworkName -eq $srcPg} | Set-NetworkAdapter -NetworkName $dstPg -Confirm:$false if (($reboot.ToLower() -match "true") -and ($v.PowerState -match "PoweredOn")){ Write-Host " rebooting VM" Restart-VM -VM $v -RunAsync -Confirm $False } } elseif ($srcPgExist.Count -eq 0) { Write-Host " no adapters connected to" $srcPg "found" } else { Write-Host " multiple adapters connected to" $srcPg "found" } } elseif ($v.Count -eq 0) { Write-Host " "$vmName "was not found" } else { Write-Host " "$v.Count "VMs found with name" $vmName } Write-Host "" } # load CSV file Try { $vmList = Import-Csv $csvVmList } Catch { Write-Host -foregroundcolor red " File is not accessible" exit } # process VMs foreach ($vm in $vmList){ VmChangeNetwork -vmName $vm.vmName -srcPg $vm.srcPg -dstPg $vm.dstPg -reboot $vm.reboot }