Saturday, July 28, 2012

vCSA upgrade tips & recommendations

Upgrading the vCenter Server Appliance looks simple enough. If you run into problems, maybe these tips can help:

  • Create the 20G (yes 20G) disk in the kb article
  • Take a snapshot first (shut down services)
  • Really. TAKE A SNAPSHOT FIRST
  • If the upgrade does not go smoothly the first time, do not try again with a half-broken install. Revert to snap.
  • If your upgrade breaks during the export, check your free inodes (df -i)
  • Increase the number of inodes on the /storage/db/export partition (mkfs -t ext2 -i 8192 /dev/sdc1 )
  • Problems mounting /dev/sdc1 (doesn't like ext2)? tune2fs -O has_journal /dev/sdc1
  • tail -f /opt/vmware/var/log/vami/updatecli.log during the upgrade. This file is created a minute or two after you kick off the upgrade. 
  • There will be a long (potentially hours long) pause in the log while the database export is happening. Top will show db2bp kjourneld and db2sync in use. Do not kill any of these processes. 
  • You didn't take my advice and create a snapshot? You needed to use a restored backup? You might need to remove the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules mac addresses if the appliance says it can't bring up eth0. 

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