Today vRealize Automation 7.2 has arrived! So, it’s time to upgrade the homelab. Currently my homelab is running vRA 7.1, so an upgrade shouldn’t be too complex.

In my homelab I’m running a minimal install of vRA, so this upgrade is probably not representative for a real environment. However, you will get an idea of the steps you have to go through to upgrade to vRealize Automation 7.2. For a full blown upgrade, I refer to the available documentation: upgrade from 6.2 to 7.2, from 7.0 to 7.2 and from 7.1 to 7.2.

The most important prerequisites for vRA 7.2 are:

The vRA Appliance must have at least 18 GB of RAM, disk 1 = 50 GB, disk 3 = 25 GB and disk 4 = 50 GB.

For the infrastructure/IAAS server and SQL Server .NET 4.5.2 is required. This is the same as for 7.1. Note that vRealize Automation 7.0 is using .NET 4.5.1, so you have to do an upgrade if you’re coming from 7.0.

Java JRE 8u91 64 bits is required for the infrastructure server and SQL server.

Also check the free space on the / partition of the vRA appliance, this should be at least 5.0 GB.

Before upgrading the vRealize Automation I recommend to snapshot the environment:

vRealize Automation appliance;

Windows infrastructure server;

SQL Server database server;

vRealize Business server.

You will need the upgrade ISO for vRealize Automation: VMware-vR-Appliance-7.2.0.381-4660246-updaterepo.iso. If you’re also running vRealize Business, you need this ISO as well: vRealize-Business-Standard-7.2.0.7586-4635843-updaterepo.

Next step is to mount this vRA ISO to the vRA appliance and log on to the vRA management interface at https://<vra-fqdn>:5480. Select use CDROM updates under update->settings, and check for updates under update->status.

Click install updates, and there you go! The upgrade of the appliance can take a while, in my case it took around 40 minutes to upgrade. Note that this was a homelabe upgrade, I’m running a HP Z800 and QNAP iSCSI storage. After the upgrade finishes, a similar message like this one appears:

Let’s go ahead at just reboot the vRA appliance. After the reboot you will have vRA 7.2 available. The next step is to upgrade the infrastructure core server Windows components.

In a earlier release you would upgrade the IaaS components by running the vRA Windows installer on your Windows server(s). Although this (legacy) method is still supported, it’s advised to upgrade the IaaS components through an upgrade shell script:

Verify the upgrade of vRA appliance(s) succeeded; Verify that all the services, except the iaas-service, on the vRA appliance are running; Check if the management agent on the infrastructure core server has been upgraded:

In this example you see the ManagementAgent is version 7.2.0.9518, so the agent is upgraded.

The next step is generate a upgrade.properties file, edit this file and start the upgrade. This steps are all taken on the vRealize Automation appliance:

cd /usr/lib/vcac/tools/upgrade/ ./generate_properties vi upgrade.properties ./upgrade

To get an idea what’s happening I’m pasting the Linux terminal output here:

vra03:~ # cd /usr/lib/vcac/tools/upgrade/ vra03:/usr/lib/vcac/tools/upgrade # ./generate_properties vra03:/usr/lib/vcac/tools/upgrade # vi upgrade.properties vra03:/usr/lib/vcac/tools/upgrade # ./upgrade Components found on node vra04.viktorious.local to upgrade: Database, Website, ModelManagerData, ModelManagerWeb, ManagerService, DemOrchestrator, DemWorker, WAPI, vSphereAgent Validating server components for node vra04.viktorious.local Command execution result: Command id: 7d0253f3-6e3e-4f1a-aa2b-d058ffe4f5d8 Type: upgrade-server Node id: 4F30A4CD-0204-481D-ADA0-8EB842BC7C66 Node host: vra04.viktorious.local Result: The command was successfully executed. Result description: None Status: COMPLETED Validating server components for node vra04.viktorious.local Command execution result: Command id: b02060a9-90bb-405d-8cdf-c3ed33cce15e Type: upgrade-server Node id: 4F30A4CD-0204-481D-ADA0-8EB842BC7C66 Node host: vra04.viktorious.local Result: The command was successfully executed. Result description: None Status: COMPLETED Validating dem components for node vra04.viktorious.local Parent command with id='9e133745-3553-41f2-b64b-84cb71a5429e' was created. Waiting all child commands to complete..................... Command execution result: Command id: 14233444-8dd8-4ba3-9e64-f803dc0a33d1 Type: upgrade-dem Node id: 4F30A4CD-0204-481D-ADA0-8EB842BC7C66 Node host: vra04.viktorious.local Result: The command was successfully executed. Result description: Status: COMPLETED Validating agent component for node vra04.viktorious.local Parent command with id='290f7e63-54d9-4874-b15c-d1de8a52f91b' was created. Waiting all child commands to complete...................... Command execution result: Command id: cbc71bb1-8422-44e0-bda5-285cc07c42f9 Type: upgrade-agent Node id: 4F30A4CD-0204-481D-ADA0-8EB842BC7C66 Node host: vra04.viktorious.local Result: The command was successfully executed. Result description: Status: COMPLETED Upgrading server components for node vra04.viktorious.local Command execution result: Command id: 66d29e46-3438-4f21-a8fa-e23b5497ca28 Type: upgrade-server Node id: 4F30A4CD-0204-481D-ADA0-8EB842BC7C66 Node host: vra04.viktorious.local Result: The command was successfully executed. Result description: None Status: COMPLETED Upgrading server components for node vra04.viktorious.local Command execution result: Command id: b3dd44d5-5217-4c7d-8831-f602af2ce14a Type: upgrade-server Node id: 4F30A4CD-0204-481D-ADA0-8EB842BC7C66 Node host: vra04.viktorious.local Result: The command was successfully executed. Result description: None Status: COMPLETED Upgrading dem components for node vra04.viktorious.local Parent command with id='cd4e5002-27ab-4b67-ac19-5c0eb5ec4d40' was created. Waiting all child commands to complete................................. ... Command execution result: Command id: 0fff7937-b613-48dd-a4d7-9b9151b9cae7 Type: upgrade-dem Node id: 4F30A4CD-0204-481D-ADA0-8EB842BC7C66 Node host: vra04.viktorious.local Result: The command was successfully executed. Result description: Status: COMPLETED Upgrading agent component for node vra04.viktorious.local Parent command with id='6ef098f0-395b-4c3b-b997-729ca8ead055' was created. Waiting all child commands to complete.............. Command execution result: Command id: cc245a5a-2587-4449-a862-89656b2a1816 Type: upgrade-agent Node id: 4F30A4CD-0204-481D-ADA0-8EB842BC7C66 Node host: vra04.viktorious.local Result: The command was successfully executed. Result description: Status: COMPLETED

And there you’ve got your freshly upgraded vRealize Automation 7.2 installation.

As you can see, all different components are upgraded by the upgrade shell script. As part of the upgrade process, the internal vRO server is also upgraded. If you have a seperate vRO server, you have to a seperate upgrade which is described in the upgrade documents mentioned at the beginning of this article.

I’ve experienced a very smooth upgrade of vRealize Automation 7.1 to 7.2. Actually everything went as expected. I hope this article helps you and gives you some indication on the upgrade process for vRA. Stay tuned for some blogpost covering the new features that are provided by vRA 7.2. For now, happy upgrading!