Upgrading to vSphere 6.7 U1

Background

Now let me start with this. Yes, this is another one of those upgrade blogs, yes I updated to 6.7U1 on day one of the release. This update is however in my lab environment. I do not care if it breaks, its a lab after all.

Do not blindly upgrade your environment, especially if it is production. Some key points to remember

• Check hardware is on the Hardware Compatibility List – https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php
• Check other VMware products play nicely together – https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/sim/interop_matrix.php
• Make sure your 3rd party products play nicely with vSphere – https://twitter.com/gostev/status/1052300560228122624 is a good example and here https://www.veeam.com/kb2784

</rant>

My lab consists of a vCenter 6.7 server and 4 ESXi hosts running vSAN. This blog post will show you the steps I took to get the lab upgraded to 6.7 U1.

The fun bit

Step 1 – vCenter upgrade

Log into the vCenter VAMI interface. This is https://YourVCAddress:5480. Navigate to the software update section.

Select the latest software update and stage it to the vCenter server.

Once the update is staged it can be installed.

Click through the following screens.

Watch the status bar……

And you may see this on the screen following the completion of the installation. Just refresh the page if this happens.

Once logged back in, you will hopefully be greeted with the installation succeeded message.

The version will now show 6.7.0.20000 AKA 6.7U1

 

Step 2 – Host upgrade

Log into the vCenter server. HTML5 interface is the default now, it’s nice, try it out.

At this point, it is worth grabbing hold of the ESXi 6.7 U1 offline bundle to import into Update Manager. You can get it here

Navigate to Update Manager and click on upload from file.

Select the offline bundle.

Wait for the bundle to upload (or just grab a coffee)

Now, navigate back to hosts and clusters view, select the cluster, click on updates tab and check the cluster for compliance.

The critical patches show as none compliant as expected. The hosts are running a build version of ESXi lower than the offline bundle we just imported.

Click the remediate button. This will go through the host’s ones by one and upgrade them. My clusters not running any workloads though. Plan accordingly.

Click the remediate button.

Once the host has installed the updates, the host console should show the below build number.

Hosts will show as being compliant in Update Manager following the upgrade.

 

Step 3 – vSAN disk version upgrade

With this release of vSphere 6.7 U1 comes a new disk version for vSAN as well. This can be upgraded as follows.

With the cluster still selected, navigate to configure tab, vSAN and then disks. Notice the disks are version 6, not version 7. Run the pre-check to ensure there will be no issues when upgrading the disk version.

If that’s all good, go ahead and upgrade the disks.

Upgrade…

And done.

 

And there you go, that’s how to upgrade to 6.7U1.

 

Ian