Upgrading VC / VR in a multi site organization

[Dodgy750]

I recently upgraded one of my VC servers to 5.5 from 5.1 and (now) understand that VR 5.1.1 is not compatible to VC 5.5 and requires an upgrade, I am struggling with the implied method of upgrading my VC / VR instances.

My example - I had 5 sites - all running VC 5.1 and VR appliance 5.1.1.  I upgraded site B to VC 5.5 and left VR at 5.1.1 for the time being.  After opening a query with VMware, they confirmed that VR 5.1 won't work in VC 5.5 (understood) but also told me that VR 5.5 is incompatible with VR 5.1.  So my major question is how do people with multi-site replication with dependencies deal with breaking VR each time they upgrade a site (VC)?  Surely we aren't expected to do all the upgrades to all the sites at the same time?  In my example if I upgrade any Site (VC instance) I will break VR somewhere along the chain and by breaking one of them, it basically means that I have to do all of them in lock-step.  Being that it is production, I'm not comfortable with upgrading all 5 VC servers in short order.

Site A -> Site B

Site A -> Site C

Site D -> Site C

Site E -> Site C

I understand the compatibility matrix - VMware has in the past been pretty good providing temporary bridges during upgrades but I can't see any other option but to upgrade all of my sites (which may imply hosts as well) in short order so that we don't substantially break our RPO / RTO expectations.

Has anyone else gone through this kind up upgrade and could give any advice?

Thanks for any and all input.

John Stevens

[mvalkanov]

Hi,

You are correct that current releases of vSphere Replication Management Server require matching major versions at the different sites and current releases of vSphere Relication Management Server require matching major version of vCenter.

This impacts all replication management operations.

If you upgrade VR at only some of the sites, replication traffic still continues (source ESXi => target VR server => ESXi => target datastore). Only management operations are not possible.

Upgrade of hosts when doing upgrade of vCenter is not required and vSphere Replications works with any ESXi 5.0 or above - both at source and at target site.

In short - you need to upgrade vCenter and VR at all sites, to have replication management functionality working. During the upgrade replication traffic is mostly unaffected (except when upgrading the particular VR server appliance).

Regards,

Martin

[Biliana]

If you have upgraded VC to 5.5 then you have to upgrade VR to 5.5 as well. Note that if you cannot upgrade all the sites in lock-step and for example you upgrade only one of the sites, you won’t have any interruption on your replications, they will continue to function normally. It is just the management functions between your protected/recovered sites that won’t be available (because VR of both sites is different version). You are still able to recover in case your protected site is not available or working. The best practice is to upgrade all sites at once, starting from VC/Web client, then VR components. Usually the ESX hosts are upgraded last, so that minimum downtime is introduced for the VMs running on them.

[Dodgy750]

Thank you for that explanation - I was sure that the replication was still functioning (as I could see on my source server) but was afraid that there might be implications to replication during the upgrade of VC across the sites.  If I can leave VR 5.1.1 in place during the VC upgrades and then upgrade VR to 5.5 after the fact, I am good to go.   I was afraid that VC might have needed to have some dialogue with VR in the interim but your explanation confirmed that we can continue replication "stand-alone" in the meantime.

Regards.