Sometimes I think there is change just for the sake of change…or to keep us on our toes 🙂 Either way I just came across an interesting upgrade gotchya when going from vCloud Director 5.1.x to 5.5.x involving previously configured Datastore Storage Profiles which translate back to vCenter into User Defined Storage Capabilities and Storage Profiles.
Most of the upgrade posts I’ve searched on out there don’t have reference to this change which comes into play in the following scenarios:
vCloud 5.5 + vCenter 5.1 – Traditional Storage Profiles configured in vCenter (Web or Client)
vCloud 5.5 + vCenter 5.5 – Tags with Storage Policy configured on vCenter (Web Only)
Nothing mentioned in the Official Upgrade KB Or, Install Best Practice KB:
If you are upgrading or have vCenter 5.5 and are upgrading vCloud 5.5 from 5.1, you will need to get up to speed with vCenter Tags (Great Post here from @gabvirtualworld) After the upgrade you will be confronted with the below after an upgrade:
Note that you are not clicking on Storage Profiles anymore, but Storage. Policies. If you where to head up to check out what datastores you can see against your Provider vDCs you will see a possible system alert and 0 datastores as shown below:
So, lets fix this and avoid any potential heart attack moments or angry forum posts to VMware…You will need to log into the vSphere Web Client and navigate your way to a view that shows your Datastores, click on Manage and go to Tags:
Click on the Assign Icon and you will be presented with your Legacy Storage Profiles. Note that you can create new Tags and assign different categories, but for the quickest outcome I would go legacy. Click on Assign:
You will now see the Assigned Tag and Category appear in the datastores Tag tab window.
Go back to the home menu of the vSphere Web Client click on Storage Profiles (now called Policies). Select one of them and Click on Edit. You will see a window open with Name and Description. The second menu item is Rule-Set 1 which I found to automatically populate with the Tag applied in the above step. Assuming here that there is some carry over during the upgrade process relative to vCenter Profiles matching with the old User-Defined Storage Capabilities.
Once you Save the changes and if you have existing VMs attached to the legacy Storage Profiles you will be asked if you wanted to Reapply the new Storage Policy to those machines. I haven’t been able to test this extensively yet, so not too sure on the realization of that warning relating to significant time and system resources.
Head back to vCloud Director and Refresh your Storage Policies under the vCenter menu option under vSphere Resources and you should have your Datastores and Datastore Cluster back populated with storage statistics.
Again, i’m not across the specific reason for the moves towards Tag and Storage Policies (feel free to comment below), but I do know it potentially will add some development time in our backend automation to verify the provisioning workflows we have in place that are still compatible. I know this initially threw us off in our upgrade Labs.
