Upgrading to vSAN 6.7 – That was easy!
Background.
I recently moved my vSAN 6.6 cluster from VCSA 6.5 to VCSA 6.7 which I detailed in this blog post. The next item on the list was to upgrade to the latest version of vSAN, 6.7.
My lab is overly simplified compared to most production environments, so it would be wise to consult the VMware interopability matrix before upgrading and also ensure any third-party applications are supported such as backup software etc. The process of upgrading however is one of the easiest I have encountered.
Upgrade process.
As vSAN is part of the VMware vSphere ESXi hypervisor, upgrading the version of ESXi in turn upgrades the version of vSAN. vSAN product versions can be checked here. To upgrade to vSAN 6.7, ESXi needs to be upgraded to version 6.7 also.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that without me doing anything, vCenter already has an upgrade baseline attached to the cluster to upgrade all the hosts to 6.7.
To begin, run the pre-check for remediation to ensure there are no issues before the upgrade process starts.
I had DRS disabled on the cluster, so this was flagged as a warning. Without DRS, the automatic cluster upgrade can not work as virtual machine workloads would not be able to automatically move to a different host.
After enabling DRS on the cluster, proceed to remediate the cluster.
Accept the EULA.
Click OK to remediate all hosts in the cluster.
The remediation process will roll through each host in the cluster in turn and upgrade the version of ESXi to 6.7. There was no interaction required from this point for the upgrade to complete.
Following the hypervisor upgrade, the vSAN disk format version needs to be upgraded from 5 to 6.
Browse to monitor, vSAN, Health, Disk format version and then click on disk format version.
Click the Upgrade On-Disk Format option.
Click upgrade.
Wait for the upgrade to complete, and you are done.
Ian