Month: June 2024

The upgrade process of VCD allows two different paths:

1. Upgrade by using an update package
2. Upgrade by using the VMware update repository

In this post, we’ll walk though the update using an update package. In particular, we’ll upgrade VCD from version 10.4.2 to 10.5.1.1 in a multi-cell setup. In this setup we have one primary appliance and two standby appliances.

During the upgrade of the VCD appliance deployment, the Cloud Director service stops working and some downtime can be expected. The downtime depends on the time we need to upgrade each VCD appliance and to run the VCD database upgrade script. The number of working cells in the VMware Cloud Director server group reduces until we stop the VCD service on the last VCD appliance. A properly configured load balancer in front of the Cloud Director HTTP endpoints should stop routing traffic to the cells that are stopped.

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If you have a production-ready VCD installation, you must create it with a database HA cluster that provides failover capabilities to the VCD database (deployments without database HA are not supported by VMware). The VMware Cloud Director appliance includes an embedded PostgreSQL database. The embedded PostgreSQL database includes the Replication Manager (repmgr) tool suite, which provides a high availability (HA) function to a cluster of PostgreSQL servers. To configure HA for the VCD database in a VCD server group, you configure a database HA cluster by deploying one primary and two standby instances of the VCD appliance.

If the primary database service fails, you can activate VCD to perform an automatic failover to a new primary. The automatic failover eliminates the need for an administrator to initiate the failover action if the primary database service fails to perform its functions for any reason. By default, the failover mode is set to manual.

In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to configure VCD failover mode.

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