NSX-T Datacenter 2.5 Upgrade Process and Preview

Now that NSX-T Datacenter 2.5 is downloadable, it's time to try this out in my home lab.

First things first, if you log in more than 90 days out, you'll be locked out of the appliance completely. If you make any changes the normal linux way (passwd and chage) the appliance will automatically revert it in about a minute. Since this is a home lab, VMWare has added the capability to set a higher maximum age here. In production, use Active Directory or another LDAP source to prevent yourself from losing NSX-T.

Downloading the upgrade bundle took quite a while - it seems that VMWare is having troubles with hosting capacity. I'm guessing that it's going to be a popular release!

We start these in the usual way, by uploading the upgrade bundle (.mub file):

Then we hit the upgrade button, and it prompts you step-by-step throughout the process. No progress bars, though!

Once the upgrade coordinator is set up, it's time to run pre-checks. This one warns you about the messaging port change.

It's time to start upgrading stuff!

As with other 2.4 releases, you don't have to use maintenance mode (expect an outage if you do that).

The management node will be unreachable unless you roll-out a cluster. If you see an "appliance unhealthy" or "Error Status 101" message, this simply means the appliance isn't ready yet.

Post-upgrade, we can see BGP statuses as promised:

Capacity Management is there:

Unfortunately, I see BGP status but no route table in the GUI. The documentation will probably direct things somewhat, but I do not see the full capabilities there.