vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC) v1.2

Part 1 of this blogseries explained what VIC is, why and when you should use it and which components are included. Part 2 walked through the installation procedure for VIC 1.1. This final part will focus on the VIC v1.2 release and how to upgrade your installation:

This blogseries covering VIC is divided into three blogposts:

1. Overview of VIC v1.1 
2. Installation procedure
3. VIC v1.2 release and upgrade procedure for VIC v1.1 to VIC v1.2 (this blogpost)

What’s new in VIC v1.2

VIC v1.2 introduced a lot of new features and improvements over VIC v1.1. I think the most exciting part is the support of native Docker container hosts. This means that you cannot only run vSphere Container Hosts (VCHs) but also native Docker Container Hosts (DCHs) which are full-featured Docker engines. Now your developers have no reason whatsoever to still demand that single Linux box to install Docker on! The following diagram is courtesy of  Patrick Daigle, Sr. Technical Marketing Architect, Cloud-Native Apps at VMware. He wrote an excellent blogpost on the VIC 1.2 release. I strongly suggest you check out his blogpost at https://blogs.vmware.com/cloudnative/2017/09/12/vsphere-integrated-containers-v1-2/.

VIC v1.2 upgrade issues

Unfortunately, there were some issues with the initial v1.2 release. The upgrade procedure would fail if you were running an external Platform Services Controller: https://github.com/vmware/vic-product/issues/837. As this was the case in my lab environment, I was unable to upgrade my VIC v1.1 install. Thankfully, the issue was resolved in VIC v1.2.1. I decided to wait for the official release of v1.2.1. It does make you wonder why this wasn’t tested though…

VIC v1.2.1 Upgrade Procedure

The upgrade procedure is pretty straightforward. The official VMware documentation is really excellent for VIC. They provided a very detailed, step-by-step guide. I will not be echoing every step in detail here. Just check out the upgrade guide at https://vmware.github.io/vic-product/assets/files/html/1.2/vic_vsphere_admin/upgrading_vic.html. The general steps required to upgrade to VIC v1.2.1 are:

1. Deploy a new VIC appliance. Don’t power on the appliance yet
2. Decouple the second virtual harddisk of your original v1.1 appliance without deleting the files from the datastore
3. Decouple the second virtual harddisk of the new v1.2.1 appliance including deleting the files from the datastore
4. Attach the second virtual harddisk of your original v1.1 appliance to the new v1.2.1 appliance
5. Power on the new V1.2.1 appliance. Don’t open the Getting started URL.
6. SSH into the appliance and execute the upgrade.sh script located in /etc/vmware/upgrade. Follow the instructions and provide the requested information. Note the additional questions about the external PSC.
   
7. Download the VIC engine binaries to your workstation
   
8. Use vic-machine-<os> with the upgrade option to upgrade your deployed vSphere Container Hosts (VCHs)
9. SSH into your vCenter Server appliance, download the new Flex and HTML5 plugin files and upgrade your plugins. Make sure you stop and start the appropriate services.
   
   More detailed steps and all required syntax is provided in the official upgrade guide: https://vmware.github.io/vic-product/assets/files/html/1.2/vic_vsphere_admin/upgrade_h5_plugin_vcsa.html
10. Login to the Admiral management appliance and your vCenter Server to check if all versions are up to date.

That’s it for this blogseries on VIC. I hope you enjoyed it!