In Part 1 we went through the relatively straight forward upgrade of the NSX Manager. In this post we will upgrade the NSX Controllers from 6.0.x to 6.1.
NSX components must be upgraded in the following order:
The upgrade process is managed by the NSX Manager. If the upgrade of a component fails or is interrupted and you need to repeat or restart the upgrade, the process begins from the point at which it stopped; it does not start over from the beginning
2. NSX Controller:
In the vSphere Web Client head to Networking & Security -> Installation and the Management Tab. You should see that your NSX Manager is at Version 6.1.0.x and that the Controller Cluster Status has Upgrade Available.
The notes suggest that you should upgrade the controllers during a Maintenance window…more on the potential reasons for that later on. Depending on the size of your Controller Cluster (3, 5, 7 etc) you need to ensure that they are all connected and that the cluster has quorum.
One way to verify the Controller Cluster has quorum is to SSH to one of the Controllers and enter in the show control-cluster status command…you should see Majority Status as Connected to Cluster Majority
There was a little confusion as to weather the upgrading of the Controllers would cause VXLAN backed VMs to loose connectivity. During the upgrade there is a period of non-majority which could result in new VMs dropping traffic. Point and case, during this maintenance window don’t allow the creation of new VMs or allow VMs to be moved (DRS) during the upgrades.
Before the actual upgrade its suggested in the release note to backup the Controller Data by Downloading a Snapshot of the config. To do that select the controller and click on the icon shown below. You will be prompted to download the small file to your PC.
Next step is to start the Upgrade. Click on Upgrade Available to start the upgrade process. That status will change to Downloading upgrade file as shown below.
Next you will see the Upgrade Status of the Controllers go through a couple different statuses as shown below. A normal upgrade will take about 5 minutes per controller…but if the upgrade fails for any reason on any controller there is a 30 minutes timeout in play. If an upgrade fails (generally due to network connectivity errors) you can click on Upgrade Available again to restart the process.
Once all the Controllers have been upgraded you should have all their Statuses on Normal and the Software Version up to 6.1.x
With the NSX Controllers done we move onto the NSX Enabled vSphere Clusters, Hosts and Logical Switche Upgrade…stay tuned for Part 3.
