Link to Official Documentation
Pre-upgrade steps
- Backup & Snapshot the appliance
- In the vSphere Web Client, identify the ESXi host where the vCenter Server Appliance is running.
- Log into the ESXi Web Client of the host identified in step 1 and locate the vCenter Server Appliance VM.
- Log into the vCenter Server Management Interface (https://appliance-IP-address-or-FQDN:5480).
- Navigate to Backup and select ‘BACKUP NOW’ to perform a manual FTP backup of the vCenter Server.
- Confirm the manual backup is successful.
- Navigate to Actions -> Shutdown to power down the vCenter Server Appliance.
- Using the ESXi Web Client, take a snapshot of the vCenter Server Appliance.
- Using the ESXi Web Client, power on the vCenter Server Appliance.
- Wait for the vSphere Web Client to become available and confirm you are able to log in.
- Obtain and attach the ISO patch to the VCSA
- Download the required product patch from VMware.
- Attach the downloaded ISO patch file to the vCenter appliance.
- SSH to the vCenter appliance and ensure you are logged into the appliance shell.
- The appliance shell will show command> , if you see root@vcenter [ ~ ] it means you are in the bash shell and you will need to switch back to the appliance shell. Execute the following command to switch to the appliance shell, then log out and back in.
chsh -s /bin/appliancesh root
Three steps to update the vCenter Server Appliance
Step 1
software-packages stage –-iso
Step 2
software-packages list --staged
Step 3
software-packages install --staged
You will notice a long list of RPM’s being installed followed by a message:
‘Converting data as part of post install ….’
This does take between 30 to 60 minutes to complete, just be patient and wait for the ‘Installation completed successfully’ message to appear.
If you are concerned about it not progressing, open a new ssh connection and view the following log:
tail -f -n50 /var/log/vmware/applmgmt/update_microservice.log
The last line of the above log will show a location similar to the below:
“DEBUG – You can find the output of the command in temp files out /var/log/vmware/applmgmt/update-script-xxxxxxxxxxx.”
If you want to see what the ‘Converting data as part of post install ….‘ portion is doing, you can view this log for more detail.
tail -f -n50 /var/log/vmware/applmgmt/update-script-xxxxxxxxxxx
Watch the console screen of the vCenter via the host and you should eventually see the appliance rebooting. If it hasn’t rebooted (check the build number via the console), I would suggest a reboot via the management interface (https://appliance-IP-address-or-FQDN:5480).
That’s it, the patch has been applied.