Upgrade order of Operations 6.7 to 7.0u3c Running on SD Card AND vSAN

[OsburnM]

Greetings all-- Looking for some advice.

Have a 12 Node vSAN cluster running 6.7U3 on SD cards.  The hosts have a 1TB local non-vsan drive that we intend to use as the new 7x install drive; however, the order of operations for getting from there to here escapes me.

Going from SD to Local drive, I'm assuming we need to re-install as if it's a new host?  If true, what happens with the vSAN storage?  Can you re-introduce a "new" 7x host into a 6.7 vSAN cluster?  The order on this one is very confusing. 

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

[SCIJLW]

You will need to re-install to move from the SD-Cards to the internal drives for ESXi.  I think what you will need to do is upgrade everything to 7.0 U3 so that you are on the same on-disk format, because 6.7 and 7.0 will be very different.  Once they are all upgraded, I would then do a re-install one-by-one so that everything matches and plays nice.

[OsburnM]

Thanks for the feedback.

So far it seems that doing a full re-load doesn't impact the existing vsan drives (meaning, it maintains the older disk format).

I just ran through a host whereby the processed I used was as follows:

1) Full evac host (make sure all vsan storage is evacuated as well).

2) Power off host

3) Remove host from inventory

4) Update host firmware & disable onboard SD Card

5) Mount 7.0u3c ISO (one that I made using vLCM in-conjunction with my hardware vendor HSM Vendor Addon, Firmware, & Components) and exported to ISO.

6) Power on host & boot to installer ISO

7) Select the local drive that isn't a vSAN drive (side-note, the installer warns you if the drive is an existing vsan-claimed drive if you accidentally selected it)

😎 Install ESXi normally & configure the DCUI network settings

9) Join host to vCenter OUTSIDE of the vSAN cluster

10) Put host into maint-mode and do all the configurations necessary (vds, ntp, license, advanced settings, etc..etc...)

11) Move completely configured host into existing 6.7 vSAN cluster

12) Exit maint-mode

This seems to be the complete process.  The 7x installer recognized the existing vsan disk partitions and didn't touch them so when I reintroduced the host to the 6.7 cluster, it auto added the diskgroup to the vsan cluster w/o any issues.  From here I just need to rinse & repeat until all the hosts in the cluster are at 7.0u3c and then I can flip the cluster to vLCM Managed Image as well as upgrade the vsan disk format.

Wish there was an easier/speedier way of doing this but there's just not good way to get from 6.7 on SD to 7.x on non-SD. 

Darn you VMware!  🙂

[SCIJLW]

I wasn't sure if it would let you have a 7.x host with the 6.7 host and that the ondisk format being that far back wouldn't cause a problem.  Good deal that worked out!