How to update vCenter 7.0 using the update planner < ProVirtualzone

In the new vCenter 7.0, a cool feature called vCenter Update Planner creates Interoperability reports in the vCenter Update Manager. When we need to update our Center, we should always use this feature before update the vCenter.

When update vCenter 7.0 using the Interoperability feature, we view all our VMware products connected to our vCenter if they have the right version to work with the new update.

When there are some updates for your vCenter, you get a banner on top of your vCenter informing you that there is a new vCenter update.

If you click on that, it will go directly to the Update Planner(Monitor Current Interoperability).

After you will see a list of all vCenter 7.0 updates, select the one you will apply and run the Interoperability Report.

vCenter Update Planner

Interoperability Report Page

In the Interoperability report, you will have listed all your VMware products connected to your vCenter 7.0(like vSphere, NSX-T, vCloud Director, etc.) and their versions. If they are supported with the vCenter update you selected.

Note: In each product, you can click on the compatible version, and it will show all the versions that are compatible with the update you plan to use.

As we can notice above, the products that Interoperability Report listed is NSX-T and vSphere(two ESXi groups, one with 6 ESXi hosts are updated, and the other group with 2 ESXi are not updated. This grouped by ESXi hosts and not by Cluster).

But in the Interoperability Report is not included my vCloud Director that should be added to this list. If you have a VMware product that is not listed, you can add it manually.

Note: vCloud Director should show automatically on the list, but I suspect that is because I don’t have the vSphere Lockout Service URL set in vCloud Director. It is something I need to double-check and test.

Interoperability Report, click in modify Type the name of your product select it, and select the version and click add.

Now you have your product in the Interoperability Report list, and you can double-check if it is supported with your new vCenter update.

After I update my ESXi hosts to the latest updates, all are green, and the vCloud Director was also added. I still need to update NSX-T to v3.1 before start the vCenter update.

Note: For some reason, I am not getting the compatible version for vCloud Director(need to check what is wrong and will update the blog post with my finding). Since this is a nested environment where I do many tests, with many updates and rollbacks, sometimes the environment has many issues, and I need to rebuild from scratch(maybe that is what I will do).

Pre-Update Checks Page

The final task is to check run the Pre-Update Checks and check if anything will prevent my vCenter update or have issues after updating the vCenter.

The report shows no issues, so we are ready to update vCenter 7.0 and finish the Update planer process.

Backup to vCenter v7.0 VAMI(Appliance Management Interface) page, I will update my vCenter v7.0.

With the last step in VAMI, we will finish our Update vCenter 7.0 using the update planner process. As we can notice above, it is easy to use and very useful to have a healthy environment and with all VMware product versions compatible.

I hope this blog post about updating your vCenter 7.0 using the update planner was useful for your updates or upgrades on your vCenter Infrastructure.

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