Little about NSX-T 3.2 – There are lots of improvements within this release, from Strong Multi-Cloud Security to Gateway Firewalls and overall better Networking and Policy Enchantments. If you want to read more about those check out the original blog post from VMware.
Download your bytes off VMware’s NSX-T website. Once you have downloaded all required packages depending on your implementation. You will want to have a backup of your NSX-T environment prior to upgrading your NSX-T environment.
Below is a step by step walk through on how to upload the VMware-NSX-upgrade-bundle-3.2.0.0.0.19067070.mub upgrade file and proceed with the NSX-T Upgrade
Once you login, go to the System Tab
Go to Lifecycle Management -> Upgrade
Well, for my NSX-T environment – I have already upgraded it before from 3.1.3.0 to 3.1.3.3 and that is why you will see a (Green) Complete at the top right of the NSX Appliances. But – Proceed with the UPGRADE NSX Button
Here you will find the VMware-NSX-upgrade-bundle-3.2.0.0.0.19067070.mub file
Continuation of Uploading file
Now you will start uploading it. This will take some time so grab a snack! 🙂
Once it has uploaded you will see a “Upgrade Bundle retrieved successfully” now you can proceed by doing the upgrade – Click on the UPGRADE button below.
This lovely EULA! 🙂 Well you gotta accept it if you want to upgrade…
This will prompt you one more time, before you execute the full upgrade process of NSX-T
Once the Upgrade has been Extracted and the Upgrade Coordinator has been restarted your upgrade path is now ready to start upgrading the Edges.
For my NSX-T, I ran the Upgrade Pre Checks – to ensure that there are no issues before I did any major upgrades.
Results of the Pre Checks, had few Issues but nothing alarming for my situation.
Here below, I am upgrading the Edges serially, that way I can keep my services up and running with minimal to no downtime. When I upgraded NSX-T Edges I only saw 1 ping drop from a whole consistent ping to one of my web servers.
More progress on the Edge Upgrades
Lets check up on the NSX Edges, here below is a snip of one of the Edges that got upgraded to NSX-T 3.2.0
Now, that the Edges have upgraded Successfully we can proceed to the Hosts
Time to upgrade the Hosts! Make sure your hosts are not in production and in maintenance mode, this upgrade process will put the hosts into Maintenance Mode so just make sure you have enough resources.
Now that the host is free of VMs – Now the upgrading is Installing NSX bits on the host, this process will need to be repeated as many times there are hosts within your cluster.
All the hosts got upgraded successfully no issues encountered – Next Step is to upgrade the NSX Managers
On the next screenshot below, you will see that the Node OS upgrade process is next, Click Start and you will initiate the NSX Manager upgrade. If you want to see all the NSX Managers status click on the 1.Node OS Upgrade.
After you click start, you will see a dialog window pop open warning you to not create any objects within the NSX Manager, Also later in the upgrade if the web interface is down, you may log into the NSX Managers via Web Console through vCenter and run this command – ‘ get upgrade progress-status ‘
This is how the Node Upgrade Status Looks like, now you see that there are some upgrades happening for the second and third NSX Managers.
Below is a sample screen snip of the NSX01 console and I executed the command to see its status.
Now, that NSX Managers have upgraded the OS, there are still many services that need to get upgraded. Below is a screenshot of the current progress it is at
All NSX Managers have been upgraded to NSX-T 3.2.0 – Click Done
Upgrade has now been complete! 🙂
