Month: November 2017

vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) 3.5 upgrade process that works

/ johannstander / Leave a comment

It is have been almost a year ago since my initial post on upgrading vRealize Network insight to 3.2 and since then there has been couple of new versions released. So time for me to upgrade!

The bad part I found out about the upgrade process is that you have to upgrade each version consecutively meaning I had to upgrade my 3.2 environment to 3.3 (which i am currently on right now) and then next step is to upgrade to 3.4 and following that another upgrade to 3.5.  You cannot skip version upgrades all!  Anyways, not going to comment on that but you see where this can be very time consuming so plan accordingly.

As before there are still two upgrade options available with online, which is handled through the GUI and offline, which is handled through the CLI.  I am currently running 3.3 and in the GUI under Settings -> Install it states that my Application is up to date. I did verify through CLI command “show-connectivity-status”  that my upgrade connectivity status shows passed and I also have no proxy.  Not wanting to open a support ticket I am going to go the manual route, and oh yes if you have a cluster configured, your only option is manual upgrade as well. Sorry!

Firstly we must upgrade the vRNI Platform appliances before we upgrade the Proxy appliances. If you have cluster then you have to start with platform1.  VMware’s KB on the manual upgrade process to 3.5 does not do such a good job of showing the exact steps to upgrade so here are mine:

  1. Download the upgrade bundle
  2. Extract the bundle from the downloaded zip file.
  3. Snapshot your vRNI Platform and proxy appliances before upgrade. (always have a backup)
  4. Login to Platform CLI with consoleuser
  5. Change password for the support user
    1. (cli) modify-password support
    2. Enter the password
  6. Use a popular tool like WinSCP to copy the bundle file to the all vRNI appliances
    1. Login with the support user
    2. Copy the bundle file in directory /home/support/
  7. Now we need to use the package-installer command to copy the bundle file to the vRNI VM
    1. package-installer copy –host localhost –user support –path /home/support/VMWare-vRNI.3.4.0.1495004044.upgrade.bundle
    2. Enter password
    3. Verify copied completed
    4. Remember one version at a time so first off have to upgrade from 3.3 to 3.4.
  8. Stop the service
    1. (cli) services stop
  9. Run the upgrade
    1. (cli) package-installer upgrade (3.3 -> 3.4)
    2. (cli) package-installer upgrade –name VMware-vRealize-Network-Insight.3.5.0.1502978926.upgrade.bundle (3.4 -> 3.5)
    3. This could take up to 30 minutes to complete so go have a cup of tea or coffee.
    4. Verify upgrade completed by checking the version
      • (cli) show-version
    5. If the service does not start..
      • (cli) services start
  10. Run step 4 through 9 on all appliances
    1. vRNI Platform appliances first
    2. vRNI Proxy appliances last

After the upgrade from 3.3 to 3.4, the upgrade KB states that a reboot is not necessary, but I found that if you do not perform a reboot you are not able to run the upgrade command “package-installer upgrade –name VMware-vRealize-Network-Insight.3.5.0.1502978926.upgrade.bundle”.  The –name parameter is not recognizable.

Note:

Do not copy/paste the commands in the KB since the filename is different that what you actually download “VMWare” and this make your upgrade fail.

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