When a VMware Cloud Foundation deployment was updated to the current version, as described previously, a few tasks should be done afterwards.
First the vSAN datastore disk format version might need an upgrade. To check this head to the “Configure” tab of your DC in vCenter and click on “vSAN /Disk Management”:
vCenter cluster overview after VMware Cloud Foundation Update 3.5
Of course you should run the pre-check by clicking on the right button. If everything is working as it should it would look like this:
Now you can click the “Upgrade” button, which informs you this can take a while. Also you should backup your data/VMs elsewhere, especially if you select “Allow Reduced Redundancy”, which speeds up the process:
As you can see now the disk format version has changed from “5” to “7”:
However still some vSAN issues are displayed:
As this deployment is a “dark site”, meaning no internet access is available, the HCL database and Release catalog have to be updated manually.
The URL to download the 14.7 MB file can be found in a post from William Lam from 2015 or in this KB article. The release catalog’s URL is taken from another KB article. This file is less than 8 KB in size.
After uploading both using the corresponding “Update from file” buttons the screen should look like this:
The last remaining issue in this case was the firmware version of the host bus adapter connecting the vSAN datastore devices could not be retrieved (“N/A”):
Since the firmware version listed in the hosts iDRAC (see next screenshot) matches one of the “Recommended firmwares” from above I decided to rather hit “Silence alert”. Eventually one could look for an updated VIB file allowing the ESXi host to retrieve the firmware version from the controller.
One more effect of the upgrade from 3.0.1.1 to 3.5 is the appearance of three more VMs in vCenter. These are the old (6.5.x) instances of the platform service controllers and the vCenter. New instances with version 6.7.x have been deployed during the upgrade. After all settings had been imported from the old ones, these were apparently powered off and kept in case something would have gone wrong.
After a period of time and confirming everything works as expected those three VMs may be deleted from the datastore:
