Upgrading your vRealize Operations Environment from 6.3 to 6.4

As many of you know, VMware recently released vRealize Operations Manager (vROps) 6.4. New updates focused on enhancing product usability and stability and supporting vSphere 6.5 environments.

Improvements included:

• Support for vSphere 6.5
• Summary pages for key vSphere objects
• Predictive Distributed Resource Scheduler (pDRS)
• 13 new dashboards
• Enhanced “All Metrics” tab for easier troubleshooting

For additional details see the release notes.

In this blog post, I’ll cover my own upgrade process from vROps 6.3 to vROps 6.4. Detailed VMware documentation of the upgrade process can be found here.

Upgrading to vROps 6.4

To summarize, this is how I upgraded my virtual appliance based vROps 6.3 instance to vROps 6.4:

1. Ensure you are on the required network.
2. Create a snapshot of each cluster in your node as shown here. At this point in the process, it is important to make sure you have proper vCenter permissions.
3. Download the necessary files from VMware. Depending on your installation (Virtual Appliance, RHEL, or Windows) you will download different packages, which are all conveniently available here.
4. Log in to the admin console of your vROps instance at the following URL – https://YourVROPSHostName/admin. Click “Software Update” in the left panel, then click “Install a Software Update” in the main panel. You will now use the packages you previously downloaded.
5. First apply the Virtual Appliance OS update: vRealize_Operations_Manager-VA-OS-6.4.0.4635873.pak.
6. Once done, the VM will reboot, then you can log back into the admin console and you should see the following:
   
   
7. Now apply the vROps package as you did in Step 5 listed above: vRealize_Operations_Manager-VA-6.4.0.4635873.pak
8. Log back in to the admin console, where the main Cluster Status page appears. The cluster will go online automatically. The status page may display the “Bring Online” button, but if it does, don’t click it.
9. Clear the browser cache/s and if the browser page doesn’t refresh automatically, refresh the page manually. The cluster status will change to “Going Online.” When the cluster changes to online, the upgrade is complete and you should see the following via the admin console:

There you have it! You are upgraded to vROps 6.4 and can enjoy the new features as previously discussed.

This blog post first appeared on the VMware Cloud Management Blog. Read the full post here.