This wednesday 5/5/2021 was RTW (Released to Web) the latested VxRail software 7.0.200 that came with new enhancements like:
- vSphere 7.0 Update 2a
- New in vSphere 7.0 U2
- HCI Mesh v2
- Simplified Capacity Monitoring, Planning, and Alerting
- vSAN performance ‘top contributors’
- vSAN RDMA
- Support internal KMS for vSAN encryption
- File services enhancement
- Suspend VMs to memory during Quick Boot
- Increased scale and DRS awareness for vSAN stretched clusters
- HCI Mesh v2
- Day 2 support of Enhanced Link Mode for VxRail-provided vCenter Server
For more details you can check the release notes here: Dell EMC VxRail™ 7.0.x Release Notes
I have been also waiting this release and patch to be able to enable Tanzu with vSphere to work with NSX Advanced Load Balancer (AVI) and VM Services. More about this in next posts.
Upgrading
The first step at this point will be to download the correct upgrade bundle from the Dell Support page.
Version 7.0.200 is supported in any platform that already supported 7.x, and the upgrade can come from 4.5, 4.7 or 7.x. As I’m upgrading in my enviroment from 7.0.132 I downloaded the VxRail 7.0.200 Composite Upgrade Package for 7.0.x.
After that should loging to your VxRail Cluster vCenter and go this way:
VxRail Cluster -> Configure -> VxRai -> Updates -> Local Updates -> Browse…
After locating the update bundle file the system will go throught verification process.
After it finished you have the option to do a pre-check or continue the update. I decided to do the pre-check first to make sure anything make do the the update breaks.
After selecting PRE-CHECK you now select RUN PRE-CHECK
You will be propted to provide the credentials for the VxRail Manager root account, vCenter Administrator account and also the VCSA root account. Keep this on hand as will be asked again when doing the actual update.
In my case the pre-check finished with just one warning about one VM that don’t have vmware tools installed. This is a virtual appliance so I disregared and processed to CLOSE PRE-CHECK.
Is also recommended to create a snapshot of the core systems VMs before proceeding (VxRail Manager, VCSA and SRS if applicable). After that been done now we can safely proceed to CONTINUE UPDATE.
VxRail adviced that the update might take a minimun of 4.1 hours, that was pretty accurate. That is why I recorded the process after this point and accelerated it if you are curious to see it.
That way after 4 hours and no downtime at all, the platform is updated to the latest VxRail Software and vSphere Update