How to Upgrade to vRealize Network Insight 4.1

After upgrading to vRealize Operations Manager 7.5, my next task at hand was upgrading to vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) 4.1. I’m really looking forward to this release because it supports VMware Enterprise PKS and Kubernetes as a data source. Very cool!

vRNI 4.1 What’s New!

Martijn Smit recently made the move to the vRealize Network Insight product team and did an awesome write up of this new version. I’m not even going to try to list all the new features here. Just read Martijn’s blogpost!

vRNI 4.1 Upgrade Options

Every upgrade starts with examining the release notes. For vRNI 4.1 you can find them, including upgrade guidance, here. You can choose between an Online Upgrade, a Single Click Offline upgrade or an Offline Upgrade. I first decided to download the upgrade file from My VMware and try the Single Click offline upgrade:

Single Click Offline Upgrade

With the upgrade file downloaded, logon to vRNI, go to Settings and Install and Support. You can then upgrade the Platform appliance by simply uploading the file and applying the upgrade. After the successful upgrade simply repeat the process for your Proxy appliances … et voila.

Resorting to Offline Upgrade

Unfortunately the Single Click Offline upgrade option failed in my homelab. The upload was interrupted for some reason and after two tries I decided to resort to the complete Offline Upgrade option. I did not troubleshoot the issue in depth because I’m pretty sure that resource depletion in my homelab is the root cause. vRealize Network Insight is very, very resource hungry and running it alongside NSX-T and PKS results in a full load on my nested homelab. Let’s explore the Offline Upgrade some more:

I used WinSCP to upload the Upgrade file for vRealize Network Insight 4.1 to my Platform Appliance. Use the ‘support’ account with the password specified during installation to connect and transfer the upgrade file.

I renamed the file to a simpler name “41.bundle:”. Next up is logging on to the console of the Platform appliance. I used the Remote Console option and the ‘consoleuser’ account, again with the password specified during the deployment. To perform the offline upgrade, simply use the following CLI command:

 package-installer upgrade --name /home/support/41.bundle

The vRealize Network Insight Platform Appliance automatically restarts after this lengthy upgrade procedure. After repeating this exact same process for my Proxy Appliance, my deployment was successfully upgraded to version 4.1:

That leaves vRealize Log Insight .. but that will have to be after my short holiday break next week!