A couple of months ago I installed vRSLCM and deployed an instance of vROps (see Part 1). My intention was to quickly follow that up with looking at how I could import and upgrade an existing environment but time seems to fly and this is the first opportunity I’ve had. So this is Part 2 (or maybe it should be ‘2nd Look at vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager’)…
In the intervening couple of months vRSLCM 1.1 has been released so my first task was to upgrade which fortunately is just a case of checking for and applying the update through the Settings menu in the vRSLCM UI.
The new features are described in this VMware blog so I’m not going to dwell on that too much other than to say that most of them centre around configuration drift management, which again is a huge task in larger environments.
Navigating to my previous environment the first thing I notice is a ‘health status not available’ message. I hadn’t noticed this before but it seems that this is pulled back from vROps using the SDDC Management Health Solution from the VMware Marketplace. Once this is installed I get a reassuring green tick on my environment. Nice.
If I click open the menu for my environment I have the option to add products, which is the goal for today.
Next I get a list of available products, from here I’m ticking vRealize Automation and choosing ‘Import’ rather than ‘New Install’ and hitting ‘Create Environment’.
Once I enter a few details relating to my environment, I hit next to review and then submit – it’s pretty straight-forward.
The process doesn’t take long at all and I now have a new vRA icon for my environment (with green tick still very much in tact)!
Now my vRA 7.2 deployment is imported I want to upgrade to 7.3. In order to do this I first need to upload the 7.3 upgrade ISO. This is done from from the settings menu, below I’m selecting the upgrade ISO which I’ve uploaded locally on the vRLCM appliance.
Once the ISO is imported successfully, I can head back to my environment and start the upgrade process by selecting ‘Upgrade’ from the list of options for my vRA deployment.
Then it’s simply a case of choosing the repository location (mine is local) and then clicking ‘Upgrade’. It’s as simple as that.
As always, the progress can be tracked from the requests tab.
One thing to note is to be mindful of the upgrade pre-requisites. My initial upgrade failed due to not having the correct hardware spec for my core IaaS VM. vRSLCM will run the CLI installer on the vRA appliance it doesn’t give any pre-upgrade feedback on pre-requisites and such.
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