vSphere 5.5 : Upgrading vCloud Director 5.1 to 5.5

In my last post i spoke about upgrading ESXi from 5.1 to 5.5.

In this blog post i will be talking about upgrading vCloud Director from 5.1 to 5.5.

I will jump in directly to the installation assuming that the vCD 5.5 bin file has been downloaded and uploaded into the vCD cell that is being upgraded.

Take a SSH session to the vCD cell using Putty.

Before you start installing the vCD you will have to put the cell into maintenance mode so if you have other  cells the traffic will be redirected to other cells and access will be blocked

to the cell that’s being upgraded.

Type the command /opt/vmware/cloud-director/bin/vmware-vcd-cell maintenance 

Use the Cell Management Tool to gracefully shut down the cell found in /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/

Retrieve the current status of the cell bu typing ./cell-management-tool -u administrator -p <Password> cell –status

It will say the cell is active.

Stop the task scheduler to quiesce the cell using this cell-management-tool command:

./cell-management-tool -u administrator -p <Password> cell –quiesce true

This command prevents new jobs from being started. Existing jobs continue to run until they complete or are cancelled.

When the Job count is 0 and Is Active  value  is false, it is safe to shut down the cell.

Shut down the cell using this cell-management-tool command:

Navigate to the path where you have copied the .bin file of vCD 5.5.

Use chmod to make it installable.

and start installation by typing the below command.

Now the Installer detects the vCD that is already present and asks if you want to upgrade it.

Type in Y

Now the upgrade will start

wait for the upgrade to complete.

Once the upgrade is complete it will ask you to upgrade the database schema.

Run the command : /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/bin/upgrade

Type Y and answer all the questions with Y

Once all the upgrades on DB is complete the installer will ask if you want to start the vCD service.

Type Y

That completes the process of upgrading the vCloud Director.

Now log in into your cloud director url using https://<vCloud-director-ip>

And now you can use all the new features that come with version 5.5.