Welcome back to vSphere 8 in the real world, and now we're going to discuss upgrading hosts.
So in a previous lesson, we discussed upgrading vCenter, and we discussed that when you're upgrading your vSphere environment as a whole,
the first thing you need to do is update your vCenter server. Once your vCenter server has been updated, then you update your ESXi hosts.
Then you update your virtual machine hardware, and then you update your VMware tools.
So here we're going to discuss upgrading your ESXi hosts.
So we're going to go under the assumption that we've already updated vCenter to the current version that we're moving to,
and now we're going to upgrade the hosts. But you want to do it in this order because, one, you don't want any kind of data loss
due to incompatibilities between the host and the vCenter server, and you don't want access loss.
Meaning you don't want the host to no longer be able to access your vCenter server, and they won't be able to communicate with the server.
They won't be able to participate in your cluster, right? So you want to make sure that you don't upgrade your host before you upgrade vCenter
because then you could run into some issues.
So methods for doing this upgrade, so an external disk, we can do scripted upgrades, we can do it from a CLI,
and we can also use the lifecycle manager to upgrade our ESXi hosts.
So external disk means that, like a USB drive, right, of some sort.
So I might, I'm definitely going to download the ISO, so I have the installation, you know, tool, the files to do the upgrade.
And then I can choose to either extract it and put the files onto a, like, FTP server or something like that and pull it over the network.
So if I'm doing some kind of a scripted upgrade, then I might do that.
Or an external drive means I basically made a bootable USB drive, bootable thumb drive of some sort,
and I'm going to boot up from that, and I'm going to, you know, then go through and do my installation.
I can boot from a thumb drive and still do a scripted installation.
Just when the setup starts, I'm going to interrupt the startup, and I'm going to point it to where my answer file is on the network
and the answer file that it could then have more information about where the rest of the files are and things like that for the actual installation.
So I could boot from a thumb drive, point it to an answer file, and have it pull the installation files over the network if I wanted to.
All right.
I can also use Lifecycle Manager, and we'll look at how to do an upgrade like that with Lifecycle Manager in just a moment.
So obviously, hardware compatibility.
It is becoming more and more common that hardware that is compatible with an older version of vSphere is not compatible with newer versions, especially processors.
So you'll see a lot of situations where I was running 6.7, and now I'm going to upgrade to 8.
I'm going to do a big jump like that, so I'll go from 6.7 to 7 to 8.
The first thing you want to do is check your hardware.
Do I have a compatible, you know, version 8 driver for my HBAs, for my NICs, for all the various devices that are on my system?
The big thing is processors.
My processors support it.
If I have an older proc in my system, it might run fantastic with 6.7, and it's not going to be compatible with 8, for example.
You might have issues like TPM.
You might have that.
It's just the model in general is not supported, all right?
So make sure that you do check the hardware compatibility list before we start doing our upgrade, before you even really start planning your upgrade.
The first step to a plan is, is my hardware compatible?
Because if you need to purchase new hardware, I have seen many scenarios where everything is perfect except my processors.
And I can buy new processors, and my motherboards support a newer processor that is compatible with the version of ESXi that I want to go to.
So I may not have to throw out my entire host.
I might need to buy a new processor.
I've seen things like that.
So just keep that in mind.
Check your procs.
Make sure you're, you know, having things that are, you know, going to be compatible with the version you're trying to go to.
There are ways you'll see online where I can say, oh, my proc isn't compatible with ESXi 8, but I can do this and ignore that.
You don't want to do that in a production environment.
If you're running it in a lab environment, maybe you feel comfortable doing that.
But I would like to know that what's in my lab is what I'm running in production.
And so if I'm running an old proc in production and something new, sorry, an old proc in my lab and something new in production, that isn't necessarily a great thing.
You want the two to be very, very similar, especially things like processors.
So going through and ignoring, you know, the incompatibility isn't recommended.
And if you end up doing that and you call VMware for support, first thing they're going to say is your proc's not supported and they're going to be out.
Because they're going to ask you for their text file, which has all the logs and things like that, and they'll know right away that it's not supported.
So I strongly encourage you to make sure that all your hardware is supported.
Then make sure you have enough of it.
So minimum two virtual CPUs.
You want to have the NXXD bits turned on.
You want to have, you know, virtualization support turned on.
At least four gigs of RAM.
Really better to have at least eight.
And that's just to install the operating system.
If you have four gigs of RAM and you're trying to run virtual machines on there, you're probably going to end up kicking yourself into not being happy with yourself.
Even in a lab environment, you probably don't want to do that.
All right.
You want, again, hardware virtualization support enabled.
Guzzy disks are non-RAID-less.
You want to install the operating system on something that's not RAID.
You want to install, like, on a disk.
It used to be not that long ago that people were installing ESXi on little SD drives that were, like, you know, installed on the motherboard.
There'd be a slot on the motherboard for these SD drives.
No longer supported.
They kind of went out for a little bit, and then VMware kind of brought them back a little bit.
Because the OS was just chewing through them because it was logging quite a bit.
So, VMware actually then went and tweaked the OS to log a little less and write its logs differently.
So, it didn't eat up those SD drives so quickly.
But now VMware is, again, saying no SD drives.
And what they recommend is that you use, like, an NVMe drive.
They recommend that you get some kind of a, you know, solid state disk, NVMe, and install on that.
And manufacturers are now making PCI cards that will have two NVMe drives that are just automatically – slide the card in.
It automatically has two NVMe drives.
They're automatically mirrored in a RAID 0 and you just install onto that.
And they're kind of designed just for installing ESXi on.
And they are obviously compatible with ESXi on the ESXi hard compatibility list.
So, that's something to consider.
If you are using SD drives currently, you can add some 512-gig SD drives – or, I'm sorry, NVMe drives that you can install your OS on instead pretty easily.
So, storage issues.
Make sure you have enough storage.
Make sure that it's big enough.
Again, if you're, you know, before using SD drives that were just small, 8 is bigger and you don't want to install the SD drives anymore.
You want to have enough room for all your logins.
Maybe you want to put your logs onto, like, a NAS storage device or NFS or, better yet, a syslog server.
So, remove the fiber channel systems before the upgrade.
That's a recommendation.
It's not a requirement.
What happens – and it happens, unfortunately, probably more than people want to, you know, talk about – is when they go to install, if you have a fiber channel HBA that the installer can see, it's going to show you all the fiber channel LUNs also.
And I've heard about, more than once, people choosing the wrong disk to install to, and they're not choosing a local disk on the system.
They choose that fiber channel LUN, and it wipes the LUN out.
And so, now, all of a sudden, you've lost a bunch of data, and you have to rebuild the LUN, and you have to restore VMs from backups, and systems are down, and things like that.
So, removing the HBA from the system, disabling it before you go in, it's just a good practice.
You don't accidentally install over it and format it and things like that.
If you're extremely confident in yourself, and you know you're going to choose the right internal disk, then – and then, also, also, during the installer, it'll ask you if you want to format VMFS data stores, and you have to say no to that.
Otherwise, again, it can go off to your LUN and format your LUNs for your proper channel adapters.
So, you can see there's a lot of different gotchas in there.
So, it's better off just not choosing – or not having the LUN even available.
You can just go into the SAN and stop presenting all the LUNs to that host.
And when you go and you boot up to do the installation, and it shows you the disk you can install to, if you're seeing your fiber channel LUNs, stop the – you know, stop the installation, go back to the SAN, unplug the cables from the HBA.
You can get – you know, if you're physically near it, whatever you need to do, just make sure you're not installing onto VMFS data stores that are on your fiber channel SAN or formatting them and things like that.
That's why that idea of removing that's there.
Not that it will cause a problem with the installation, but you might end up losing data accidentally.
So, some pro tips here.
Before you start a backup or before you start the installation, backup everything you can.
If you want to retain logs and things like that, backup the log files, backup data stores, backup VMs, backup anything on local storage.
Okay, backup anything on local storage.
Make sure you have a backup of any ISOs that are in local storage.
If you have any VMs, if you have any templates on local storage, things like that, back all that stuff up.
You may plan on not saying to format anything.
You're just going to go in and install and leave your VMFS data stores, you know, un-reformatted.
Don't take the chance.
Just back everything up, okay?
Any VMs that are on that host, if you can't migrate them off, you'll need to shut them down.
If they are on there, before you start the installation, you should be able to put that host in a maintenance mode and evacuate all the VMs off of it that way.
But if you're using local storage, you might have to shut them down.
And then be very, very careful not to format that data store.
Back things up first.
So, for remote management, here they're showing some, you know, ILOs, DRACs, IBM RSA tools.
Basically, those give you access to the host remotely.
So, it's like you're sitting at the host at a console.
You can mount the ISO into the ILO or into the DRAC, and it will look like a CD-ROM drive to the device,
and it tells you what version of Java these different versions of ILOs and DRACs use.
All right?
So, those are pretty common in, you know, any kind of enterprise-level server.
The ISO, so you're going to download the ISO from VMware's website.
You will want to view the MD5 checksum and make sure that it's, you know, integrity is good.
And then you can either use a – burn it to a CD or DVD and put it into the drive of the host,
if your host has a CD and DVD drive still.
Make a USB bootable drive.
That is a very common way.
You can do a network boot and PXE it.
You can use a fiber channel controller.
And you can also, as we mentioned, mount the ISO into your ILO or your DRAC.
So, once you have that mounted and it's visible, then you want to configure the boot process.
You want to go into your BIOS and you want to configure the BIOS to boot from whatever device it is that you have the ISO on,
either it be a USB drive or it be you're going to do a PXE boot
or if you're going to be booting from your remote management card, your ILO, your DRAC.
All right?
You're going to select that device to be your – this is after you disconnected the LUNs from the fiber channel HBAs,
things like that.
You're going to reboot the host.
You're going to go into your BIOS, make your changes.
Select where you want it to upgrade, right?
So, where are you going to install the upgrade to?
Press F11 to start the installation.
Eject the disk when it's done.
Reboot the host.
And then it will come back up again when your upgrade is completed.
And then you want to do things like check your logs and make sure that there's no errors
and that all the drivers got installed correctly without error and things like that.
So, here's an example of a startup script, you know, how you would do that.
You're going to start the installation, right?
So, you could boot to the ISO.
You could boot to a thumb drive, something like that.
So, you're going to start your installation.
In the installer, you're going to do a Shift-O, right, to edit your boot options.
And then you're going to point it to where's your kickstart file.
So, here's an example.
You can say KS, which is your kickstart file, equals – and then here's an HTTPS path or HTTP path to that.
You can also point it to, like, a TFTP server or something like that as well.
So, after your installation is done, so you've booted up to the ISO and you've gone through the installation,
so a few quick little clicks, now it's rebooted and you're back in your ESXi host,
go ahead and view your log files.
Make sure that, again, there's no errors trying to install any devices.
There's no errors, you know, getting anything up and running and that you are completely on the new version
that you want to be on and all your device drivers are loaded successfully,
all your devices are working successfully.
You don't want to try and do your upgrade and find that your HPA controller doesn't have a driver associated with it
or, you know, it's not compatible on the compatibility list for ESXi 8,
and so therefore doesn't load a driver for it, so that device isn't going to work,
or, you know, a 10 gig NIC or something like that, right?
Make sure that the server comes back up in vCenter.
You might need to go in and tell it to connect back into vCenter.
Now, when you first do your installation, your host is going to be in an evaluation mode for up to 60 days.
I recommend you install your licenses right away.
People will sometimes get complacent when they do these upgrades and then, okay,
they go through and upgrade all their hosts and they get, you know, vCenter updated
and all their hosts are upgraded and everything's upgraded, and they feel very confident,
okay, I have three or two months, I have 60 days, two months to get in there and add the licenses,
and they're making configurations and they're all excited to see the new version.
Then later, maybe at 30 days or 45 days or whatever, they add their license,
not realizing that they've enabled features that they don't pay for, they don't have paid for,
and when they add their license right away, those features stop working.
So maybe they did something like, like, oh, look, I can create distributed virtual switches now.
They can do all their NIC switching, you know, to distribute virtual switches,
and they're all excited about that, and then they add their license,
and then their distributed virtual switches stop working and go away,
because they don't have an Enterprise Plus license to pay for that.
So that's a problem.
So make sure that you add your licenses right away,
so that way you don't enable features that you haven't paid for.
Then upgrade your VMs.
So first upgrade vCenter.
We discussed that.
Then I upgrade my hosts, and I got all my hosts configured and got my licenses installed.
Now it's time to upgrade my hosts, my VMs.
I'm going to upgrade the virtual hardware on my VMs,
and then I'm going to upgrade the VMware tools on my VMs.
That's the last step after your installation.
So some data store concerns.
So with VMFS, new versions of ESXi can bring along new versions of VMFS,
which is the file system used, you know, native for ESXi.
So you upgrade your ESXi.
It may require an update to VMFS.
What updates are required for your environment?
So a mandatory upgrade.
If you have VMFS 3, you're going to have to upgrade your VMFS,
and it's going to automatically do that upgrade for you when you boot into the
new version, like version 7.
Now, if you have VMFS 5 and you want to go to VMFS 6, not going to be as easy.
You're going to need to have a data store that you can move all the VMs to
to evacuate a data store.
Then you can go ahead and basically reformat it as version VMFS 6.
Then you can move VMs to it and go to the next.
If you don't have a data store big enough to get all your VMs off of one of
your other data stores, then upgrading to 6 is going to be a challenge for you.
You need a place to put the VMs because it's going to basically wipe the
drives and do that upgrade.
So make sure you have a place to put your VMs.
That's why it's good to not, you know,
overallocate the space on your storage arrays because a lot of different
things are going to require you to do some upgrades there.
So we discussed host upgrade process.
We discussed compatibility,
making sure that our hardware is compatible with the version of ESX 5 you
want to go to.
We discussed storage, the different kinds of storage we can use,
the different kinds of media that we can boot up to from our ISO image.
We discussed doing a scripted installation.
And we discussed upgrading data stores.