Since the release of vCenter 6.5a that included support for NSX 6.3 I could finally look to upgrade my lab environment. It is important you follow the official upgrade path for other products, for instance the Platform Service Controller (PSC) must be upgraded first. I will be covering that in a separate post, this post will cover NSX. The official upgrade sequence can be found here.

VMware cover the upgrade procedure here you must read the NSX 6.3 release notes before starting here. If you are going to do this in production be aware of any potential impact of the upgrade see here.

First browse the NSX administration page and log in with admin.

I start by taking a backup Manage - Backup & Restore - Backup.

Once complete I go to Manage - Upgrade - Upgrade. From here

Point to the downloaded update pack for 6.3.

I choose if I want to enable SSH or not. Then Upgrade.

Once complete I would be taken back to the main NSX Manager administration page.

Now when I log back in I can see im running on the later version.

Now I log back into vCenter via the Web Client and go to Home - Network & Security - Installation - Management. From here I now have an option to upgrade the controller cluster.

Confirm.

Let the process complete.

After the reboot it appeared back as complete but with Disk Alerts. I havent had this error before in my lab and it is recommended to install on dedicated disks but all my lab is nested.

To clear this I simply rebooted again.

Now I need to update the hosts vibs I go to Home - Network & Security - Installation - Host Preparation where again I have an option to upgrade.

This automated process didnt work for me, my hosts would report ‘Not Ready’.

After troubleshooting for a while I decided to install the vibs manually. First I download the vxlan.zip package from my NSX Manager. For 6.3 browse to the following and find the path that relates to your exact environment.

>https://NSX_MANAGER_IP/bin/vdn/nwfabric.properties

I download the package I need and upload it to the hosts /tmp directory. I then need to SSH onto the host and run the following.

>esxcli software vib install -no-sig-check -v /tmp/nameofvib.vib

Install both the vsip and vxlan vib. The host requires a reboot.

Once all hosts were rebooted they are now running on the latest version.

My lab doesnt have any Edge appliances or Logical Firewalls but they would then need to be upgraded.