Upgrades for the vRealize Automation software (formerly vCloud Automation Center) seem to be coming quite often these days.  This post gives a quick overview on how to upgrade your current environment to the latest release.  Of course for official documentation, please check out VMware’s documentation for details.  vRealize Upgrade Instructions

Pre-Install Steps

Obviously you should ensure that you’ve got backups in the event something catastrophic should occur.  Be sure to grab a backup of the IaaS database, and snapshot your vRA appliances, as well as any of the servers running the IaaS components such as the Model Manager, DEM Workers, Orchestrators and Agents.  For this guide, we have a vRA appliance, and a single IaaS Server running the rest of the components.  A separate SQL Server is housing the database.

The following instructions are for upgrading from 6.1 to 6.2.  Different upgrade paths may be similar but not necessarily the same.

Login to your appliance and stop the vco-server service.  If you happen to have multiple appliances configured with HA, be sure to stop the services on each of the appliances.   You can stop the service by connecting to your appliance via SSH and running service vco-server stop .  Next, run chkconfig vco-server off.  To check the server status, you can use service vco-server status and make sure the status shows up as “Not Running”.

If you have multiple vRealize Automation appliances you should also stop the vcas-server, apache2, and rabbitmq-server services on the appliances you’re not actively upgrading.  In the case of this post, I only have one appliance so I left the services running.

Next, stop the vCAC services on the IaaS Host(s).  The recommend stop order  is below:

1. Vmware vCloud Automation Center agents
2. DEM Workers
3. DEM Orchestrators
4. vCAC Manager Services

vRealize Automation Appliance Upgrades

Now that the services are stopped, log into the portal management by going to the appliance URL port 5480.  Go to the Update tab and click check updates.  After a few seconds, the appliance should respond that an update is available.  At that point, you can click the Install Updates button.  NOTE:  Be prepared to wait if you do this method, it took over 30 minutes to install the updates which would depend on customer Internet speed, demand for the update from VMware etc.

If you don’t want to automatically download the updates, you can download an ISO or zip file and mount a different repository to make the process quicker.  Just change the settings on the appliance management portal under the update–> settings tab.

After the install has finished, it will notify you that a reboot is required.  Reboot the appliance.  When it comes back up, you can see the appliance version is updated under the “System” tab.

IaaS Components Upgrade

Now that the appliance(s) have been upgraded, we can move onto the IaaS server(s).  The first step to upgrading the IaaS components, is to upgrade the IaaS Database which holds all of the request information.  To run the upgrade, grab the database upgrade scripts from the appliance portal.  http://vcacAppliance:5480/installer/  Save and unpack the database upgrade scripts on a server with access to the IaaS Database.

NOTE:  VMware specifically mentions only running the DBUpgrade Scripts once.  I don’t know the problem if this is run multiple times, but be aware of this just in case.

Open a command prompt and change the directory to where you stored the unpacked database upgrade scripts.  The following switches are available.

• -S   — The database server followed by [,port number] or [SQLinstance]
• -d   — The database name
• -E   — Windows Authentication is used to connect to the database.  No details needed.
• -U  — Username if needed
• -l   —  the path for the log files.  By default, the logs are stored in the DBUpgrade script directory.

I ran the following script with my SQL Server, database name and I am using Windows Authentication so I just specified the -E switch.

Run DBUpgrade -S [SQLDatabase] -d [DatabaseName] -E 

Now that the database upgraded successfully, we can go back to the vCAC appliance page and download the IaaS Installer to our IaaS server(s).   Run the installer from an elevated session on the IaaS Server(s).

Enter the root username and password to connect to the appliance, and click the check box to accept the certificate.  Click, next.

Choose the Upgrade option which should be highlighted already.  Click, next.

Select the components that are housed on the IaaS server that need to be upgrade.  I chose all of them since all the services are running on a single IaaS server.

If you are in a distributed install, upgrade the services in the following order:

1. Websites
2. Manager Services
3. DEM orchestrator and workers
4. Agents

Enter the Database server and database name as well.  Click, next.

Click Upgrade.

Wait for the upgrade to complete.  This could take some time so wait patiently.

Click Next once the install is completed.

Rebranding

Congratulations! Your vCAC instance has been upgraded to vRealize Automation 6.2.  If you would like to change the branding to show “vRealize” instead of the “vCloud Automation Center” you can login to the vRealize Appliance Portal, and go to the vRA Settings tab and then click SSO.  Re-enter the SSO Settings, and click the “Apply Branding” checkbox.  Click Save Settings.

The next time you login to the vRealize Portal, you’ll see “VMware vRealize Automation” if that’s important to you.

Summary

As always, check the vSphere official documentation for upgrade steps, but this post should give you a good idea about the process of upgrading and some screenshots in case you get stuck.