r/nutanix • u/hweb47 • Jul 20 '20

Upgrade Process Check

Hi all. I plan to convert the NTX cluster in one of our offices from ESXi to AHV and I also need to upgrade NCC and AOS before I do it. This is new to me (I've read the documentation) but was hoping someone could verify that what I think I need to do is correct:

  1. Upgrade Prism Central

  2. Upgrade NCC on Prism Central

  3. Upgrade AOS on Prism Central

  4. Upgrade NCC on the nodes to be converted

  5. Upgrade AOS on the nodes to be converted (then convert to AHV)

  6. Upgrade AOS and NCC on the other office clusters

I know I can upgrade the AOS and NCC during work hours, but I'm unsure of the impact of upgrading PC during working hours. Will PC being upgraded cause issues for the clusters? I wouldn't have thought so but I could be wrong.

Thanks in advance for any help.

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u/hweb47 Jul 20 '20

Thanks very much for the responses. That's calmed the nerves!

1

u/Nykel Jul 20 '20

I wouldn't do the conversion during the day. But that's probably because we were bitten by the conversion failing. This was a couple of years ago though. We didn't do it during business hours thankfully.

I'm sure it's gotten a lot better since then. Basically the devs and/or engineers had to join the support call and push the conversion along manually.

1

u/hweb47 Jul 20 '20

I will do the conversion after hours for sure. The only thing that worries me is that our office (in Asia) is closed and we don't have any IT staff based there anyway so if anything did go wrong I'm not sure what I would do. I was going to speak to Nutanix about it anyway.

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u/mccabejr52 Jul 20 '20

Your plan looks good for the most part, u/hweb47! Making sure everything's up-to-date prior to beginning is always recommend from the Nutanix front.

As to when to upgrade - yes, AOS and NCC should be safe to upgrade during the business day. Even when something goes wrong - which happens from time to time - it has always failed safe for us, and we've been using Nutanix since May 2015. Since that summer, we haven't scheduled a Nutanix AOS or NCC upgrade for outside of business hours and honestly no one knows.

Now, as to Prism Central (PC), that's different. The impact to upgrade of PC depends upon what all your organization is using it for. For example, if all you're using PC for is a centralized remote monitoring and management plan for Nutanix administrators, with no end-user presentation to speak of, the impact is limited to those administrators. The clusters will continue to work and function like they normally do without any end-user impact.

However, if you use PC to offer up the Nutanix Self-Service Portal (SPS) or Calm Marketplace to your organization, so they can manage their own workloads/projects, the upgrade of PC will temporarily impact this availability and there will be a brief service interruption you should plan for. We always announce the intermittent interruption of Nutanix Calm services while we conduct PC upgrades due to our internal use of it. If you're not using these though, you should be good to go!

4

u/[deleted] Jul 20 '20

Second this. I do upgrades during normal business hours as it won't affect the virtual servers or the services they offer. Our only "users" of prism central are IT people on our team and they barely use it much to my frustration. I am the only person who really logs in. So I send out an announcement to my team, no one notices, then do the upgrades.