I decided to take a break a late Friday afternoon from some other tasks and get my vRO upgrade done. I currently have a vRO 8.0.1, which, in honesty I have done very little with. I have a few posts on setting tit up and then reality demanded that I do other things… So I thought I would grab a bit of time and do a (what I hope is a fairly quick post on upgrading vRO as a stand alone to the latest (and hopefully greatest version of 8.1
One quick thing worth mentioning is, you can upgrade from 8.0 (8.0.1) to 8.1 You can not upgrade from 7 and earlier. vRO has simply changed too much with the new release.
Prerequisites
The Prereqs, are to download the iso file from my.vmware.com. The link here takes you straight to the Update.
You need the Update repository ISO. According to the documentation the snapshot is taken later.
Once that is downloaded you need to attach it to your vm. This can be done by adding it to your datastore, client device or Content library. Remember to check the box for “Connect on power on” else the upgrade fails.
Once that is done we can start.
Doing the upgrade
Log into the vRO appliance as root and run blkid to find the device name for the vRO appliance. In my case it is CDROM. Note it may vary (according to the VMware documentation) but here is how it looks for me:
Mount the CD drive by running the following command:
mount /dev/cdrom mnt/cdrom
If you have a vRO cluster you must perform the action above on each node.
Next we need to run the following command:
vracli upgrade exec -y –prepare –profile lcm –repo cdrom://
This will execute some checks and set the bootstrap and then shutdown services. It may take some time, so let it run until you get a prompt back.
Next it is time to power down the appliance, as the script mentions between the lines.
Next it is advised to take a snapshot before powering on again. This way you get the snapshot taken without the memory option being used. (vRO does not supported memory based snapshots). After this completes, power on the vro appliance again. Before powering it on, check that you have marked the upgrade iso for connect on power on.
As this is at the point of no return you are given two options, run the upgrade by running “vracli upgrade –cancel” or run “vracli upgrade exec” to upgrade to 8.1
Now it is time to wait and let vRO do its thing (This may take more than an hour to complete and system is likely rebooted a number of times.
If you want to follow what is going on you can do a cd to /var/log/vmware/prelude
from there do a tail -f upgrade-<date-time>
In my case there was one reboot and the whole thing took around 45-50 minutes.
And at the end I get the logon screen:
And I can connect to the control center
And also the (sadly relatively empty) orchestrator client works:
That’s it for now, next week (hopefully) vRA.