Upgrading from 5.0 to 5.0.1 is such a very simple process that it doesn't require a lot of attention, but there's one quick caveat regarding the vSphere Replication virtual appliances that should be noted.
Because of this, I figured it would be worthwhile to walk you through a couple of different ways to make sure you VR appliances are up to date along with the latest SRM code.
As always, I follow an upgrade process like this:
A) Protected site VC first. Why? You can still do a recovery on the other site if things go sour for you for any reason! These are all in-place upgrades and should take minimal time and effort.
1) vCenter Server
2) vSphere Client
3) Web Client Server— oh wait, nope, not for 5.0.1, there's no update. Careful you don't just blindly "next-next-next" your way through this or it'll uninstall your web client server.
4) VUM. Very important, make sure this is up to date!
B) Protected site SRM
1) In-place upgrade of SRM to 5.0.1.
C) Recovery Site vCenter Server (same steps as above)
D) Recovery Site SRM Server (same steps as above)
That was easy. Now you should be back to a good state with everything protected and running. All you need to do is log into your vCenter and check that SRM is still functional.
Don't forget you'll need to update the SRM plugin as well! This upgrade requires that the vpxclient gets bounced, so do that and make sure SRM is working.
Ah but wait, SRM now has the vSphere Replication pieces if you've installed them, and we didn't upgrade those as part of the SRM server upgrade. So how do we do this? There are a couple of ways.
C) Upgrade vSphere Replication
One way is to upgrade the appliances themselves by logging into them and using the built-in update tools. The other is that we could use vSphere Update Manager.
I like logging into the appliances and running the update. The problem is that it presumes you have an internet connection available to the appliances, and it also assumes your proxy settings are correct, so please double check the appliance configuration in order to do this! I've done this through a proxy server and it worked like a charm for me.
For those of you who want to try it via the web interface of the appliance, it's quite straight forward. Log onto the appliance through the web interface, click on the "update" tab on the top, click on the "Check Updates" action button on the right, and if updates are available, click on the "Install Updates" action. That's it!
But this is far too manual overall, requires internet and proxy access for your appliances, and is not necessarily the most verbose about what's going on behind the scenes. Let's use VUM instead.
The great news is that VUM has built-in "VA Upgrade" baselines that include upgrading the VR component appliances to the latest available build. You can build your own baselines for the virtual appliances if you want, but in this case there's a predefined baseline that you can use.
We can simply attach the appropriate baseline to the VR appliances, or a folder containing them, and remediate. It'll go through a bunch of actions you can follow via events in the Tasks and Events tab:
Voila. They are now upgraded to the latest and greatest.
So I recommend doing all of this through VUM. It's quick, easy, doesn't require any manual process, and means we don't need to worry about network connectivity for the appliances to get to the outside world, so it's also more secure. You can also reuse the baseline pretty easily next time it comes time to upgrade. Lastly VUM has the great ability to do snapshots and rollbacks in case of problems, so it's nicely fixable if things go wrong!
That's it for now – basically, when upgrading SRM from now on, make sure you also remember to upgrade your vSphere Replication components, and my advice to you is to use VUM to do so.
