Tips when preparing for the 6.1 upgrade:
- If you are planning on upgrading your 6.0.x vCAC environment to 6.1, follow the instructions in this doc and pay close attention to the details: http://pubs.vmware.com/vCAC-61/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/vcloud-automation-center-61-upgrade.pdf.
- In addition, you can typically find some good blog posts with step-by-step guides for this type of work. http://virtumaster.com/ is just one example. It can also be helpful to do a quick search to see what existing KBs have come out so far for the new release. Get to googling!
- There are some very friendly folks in the virtualization community that enjoy sharing their tech experiences with others, so keep an eye on social media chatter regarding the upgrade (ahem, Twitter).
- Test the upgrade in the lab. (Though, unfortunately, if your lab is not identical to production, you may not be able to test for all potential issues. In my case, the biggest bug I hit did not occur in the lab but was seen in the production environment)
- Snapshot, snapshot, snapshot. Especially the IaaS server. And backup the IaaS DB.
A few issues to be aware of when upgrading to 6.1:
Issue #1 – If you try to upgrade the ID appliance and get “Error: Failed to install updates (Error while running installation tests…” and you see errors in the logs about conflicts with the certificate updates, try the following:
SSH to the ID appliance and run rpm -e vmware-certificate-client. Then try running the update again. Thanks to @stvkpln for sharing the fix.
Issue #2 – If you are going through the IaaS upgrade and get the following error near the end of the wizard (before the upgrade install even begins):
Check to see how many DEM registry keys you have in the following location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\VMware, Inc.\VMware vCloud Automation Center DEM
If you see extra DEM or DEO keys (ie. you only have 2 DEM workers install on the server but you see 3 DEM worker keys), this may be related to your issue.
Workaround:
Option 1 (remove duplicate keys):
- Export the DEM registry key to back it up: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\VMware, Inc.\VMware vCloud Automation Center DEM
- Check the contents of the registry keys that match your installed DEMs for version and install path information.
- Remove the duplicate DEMInstance keys for the DEO and DEM.
- Run the upgrade.
Option 2 (remove/reinstall):
- Remove all DEMS from machine
- Remove DEM registry keys
- Run Upgrade
- Install 6.1 DEMs with the Same name as the 6.0 DEMs
I would recommend going with Option 2 (especially if it is difficult to confirm by looking at the contents which keys match the installed DEMs). Thanks to @virtualjad and VMware engineering for sharing the workaround.
Issue #3 – Make sure to import the vCO package update for vCAC 6.1, as mentioned in KB 2088838, especially if you use stub workflows.
