vSAN 6.7 to 7.* upgardes

[mutthu]

We have a 2-node vSAN 6.7 ready node from Dell. The witness appliances are running at our HQ, where the vcenter 6.7 resides. I think I can not upgrade the appliance and have to switch the appliance to version 7.*.
I have done several VMware cluster upgrades, not the vSAN.
I am looking for upgrade procedures for vSAN from 6.7 to 7.* I would appreciate it if anyone put me in the right direction.

[TheBobkin]

@mutthu, Correct regarding to deploy new 7.X Witness as the licensing version change won't work with the OEM-embedded license (and other changes made to these) - there were some issues with running Witnesses of higher version than the ESXi they are on from 6.0/6.5 to 6.7 (https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/74929) but I am not aware of any such limitation running a 7.0 Witness on ESXi 6.7 .

What I would advise is that you deploy a new 7.X Witness in the same location as the current one and validate it is functional, if all good then you can go ahead and update the data-nodes to 7.X then use the 'Replace Witness' function to change the Witness to the new one.

[mutthu]

If I understood that, you suggest upgrading the ESXi hosts in the 2-node cluster to version 7, then changing the Witness to the same version as the ESXi host. Am I correct?

[ManuelDB]

you can also upgrade the witness with Update Manager, you just had to disconnect/reconnect the witness once upgraded because it will reimport the new license

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/81007

I had upgraded a 2 hosts cluster from 6.7u3 to 7.0u3 and I had to disconnect/reconnect the witness, so the not that reports "fixed on 7.0u2" in the KB had not worked for me, but the workaround is very easy so I'm not complaining

[mutthu]

Did you use life cycle manager to upgrade?
I would appreciate it if you could list the vSAN node upgrade procedure.

[ManuelDB]

Yes, I had used only Lifecycle Manager.

The upgrade is pretty simple:

0- Step 0: check that all your hardware (SSD/HDD and Controller) are in HCL with VSAN with your actual firmwares (don't bother about driver, they will be updated with the upgrade)

1- Upgrade your licenses (VCenter, VSphere and VSAN) to 7.0

2- Upgrade VCenter to 7.0x (download the ISO, mount on your PC, snapshot&backup vcenter, go inside vcsa-ui-installer\win32 and launch installer.exe and then Upgrade on the popup window)

3- Load new 7.0 licenses on VCenter and apply only the VCenter license

4- Check VSAN Health, and check that there are no rebuild ongoing

5- Upload the lastest VSphere 7.x ISO on Lifecycle Manager (VSAN Health will also suggests you with a warning)

6- Create a new baseline with the uploaded ISO and apply to the Cluster AND to the Witness node (the blue host, that in VCenter 7.x is no more blue, not the witness VM..)

7- Migrate VMs from first node, put it in maintenance mode, remediate the ISO Baseline and wait

8- After successfull upgrade of first node, exit maintenance, wait and check VSAN Health and VSAN Rebuild to be sure that all is good (wait 5-10 minutes to be 100% sure)

9- Do step 7 and 8 again for second node

10- Apply your VSAN license and VSphere license to the 2 nodes (they will start with evaluation license, so no hurry, but be sure to not forget about this step!!)

11- Upgrade the Witness node with lifecycle manager and ISO Baseline

12- After the upgrade, you will see the witness with a Evaluation license, and in License Manager there will be only the Witness 6.x license. Here, you must disconnect (NOT REMOVE, only disconnect) and connect back the witness to the cluster. This will reimport the new Witness 7.x license

13- Disk Format Upgrade: from my point of view it's always better to wait 7 days to be sure that all is stable before doing the upgrade, so you can in any moment rollback to 6.7. After a week, upgrade the Disk Format, a non intrusive task that can be done in few minutes in production enviroment without any slowdown

If you prefer, you can also, once every node is rebooted for the ISO Baseline Upgrade, apply the Critical Patch baseline and remediate also that before exiting Maintenance mode, in order to have the most updated version possible.

I prefer for the first step to stay with the ISO version for a few weeks, because with that it's much easyer, if you need to rebuild a node or the witness, to recreate it with exactly the same build number as the others, because baseline could change in a week and if you reinstall a node and apply the critical baseline you could end with two nodes with different build numbers, but this is my humble opinion.