VMware Cloud Community
VictorY2000
Contributor
Contributor
‎03-26-2014 02:59 PM

upgrade vCloud Director from 5.1 to 5.5

In order to minimize the downtime, could we clone current vCloud Director VM and vShield Manager VM? then upgrade them (the cloned VMs in an isolate network) first, later we schedule a maintenance window, we will stop all services and db, then we put those cloned VMs (upgraded) into production network, and just upgrade the database, then start everything again.  Anyone can point out the issue with this procedure?

By the way,  here is the official procedure to upgrade vCloud Director:  VMware KB: Upgrading to VMware vCloud Director 5.5.x best practices

Thank you!

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IamTHEvilONE
Immortal
Immortal
‎03-27-2014 06:34 AM

In short, I would only do this if the time between the clone (As a backup) and the upgrade is non-existent.

If there is any delta, based on the time span between clone and upgrade, the vShield Manager might be out of sync and there would be some manual clean up process.  You gotta think that vShield is a live system with a DB recording where Edge Devices are and is constantly in sync with vCenter, and vCloud Director syncs information from vShield.

The vCloud Director part is not that big of a deal.  the Database and some config files are more important than the OS running the application.  When you do the vCD upgrade, it's basically doing an RPM update (remove install) then you run a command to update the DB schema to correspond to the current version.