VMware Cloud Director 10.4.1

VMware Cloud Director is a self-service virtual data Centre compute, network, storage, and security are all provided by VMware Cloud Director, a cloud services platform.

Recently, VMware Cloud Director 10.4.1 (VCD) was released, and with it, the appliance's internal PostgreSQL database was upgraded from version 10 to 14. (as well as replication manager upgrade). 

The new concepts introduced in VMware Cloud Director 10.4.1 make it easier to create, deploy, run, and manage extensions.

This indicates that the typical upgrade procedure has changed, is now a little trickier, and may take a lot longer than it did previously. So be aware of this change. The purpose of this article is to explain what's happening in the background so that readers can better understand why particular steps are required.

If you use the Linux deployment format, VCD 10.4.1 is still interoperable with PostgreSQL 10-14, so this blog only applies if you use the appliance deployment. PostgreSQL version 10 is no longer supported, which is the primary reason for the switch, aside from the fact that newer is always better.

Fig 1.1- VMware Cloud Director

• During the vamicli update procedure, the database will be upgraded.
• The vmware-vcd service must be turned off, but all appliance nodes must be online.
• You must begin the upgrade process on the primary database appliance node; it will probably take the longest time because new database version 14 will be installed side by side and all the data converted. Therefore, the database partition must have enough free space.
• It is always advised to take cold snapshots of every node prior to the upgrade (make sure the snapshots are done while all DB nodes are off at the same time as you do not want to restore snapshot of primary to older state while secondary nodes are ahead)
• During the vami upgrade process, the secondary DB nodes will replicate the upgraded DB to the primary. Therefore, these nodes simply delete the existing DB and won't require any additional space.
• The password for the vCloud database will be updated to a new, automatically generated 14-character string and replicated across all nodes in the VCD cluster. As there is no way to retrieve the automatically generated password, you might want to change it if you use your own tooling to access the database directly. Running psql in the context of the elevated Postgres account is required to accomplish this.
• Options for advanced PostgreSQL configuration won't be kept. In fact, they might not work with PostgreSQL 14 at all.