On October 24, 16:00 CEST, the VeeamON Resiliency Summit will take place, streamed live online worldwide. We can look forward to the announcement of the Veeam Data Platform 23H2 update.
Furthermore, there will be three tracks of breakout sessions focusing on Veeam Data Platform, Veeam platform extensions and Veeam partner ecosystem.
The Veeam Data Platform 23H2 update includes the latest resiliency features of Veeam Backup & Replication V12.1, Veeam ONE V12.1 and Veeam Recovery Orchestrator v7, as well as updates to AWS v7, Azure v6 and Google v5.
Registration
It’s definitely worth registering, even if you can’t watch the stream online live, as the content will be available on demand later.
This is a brief guide on how to upgrade Tanzu Workload Management within the vSphere cluster.
Kubernetes Release and Patch Cycles
Kubernetes versions are specified as x.y.z following Semantic Versioning terminology, where x is the major version, y is the minor version, and z is the patch version. For example, v1.22.6 denotes a minor version 22 with patch level 6. Minor versions are released approximately every 3-4 months. In the meantime, there are several patches within the minor version.
The Kubernetes project maintains release branches for the last three minor versions (1.24, 1.23, 1.22). Since Kubernetes 1.19, newer versions receive patch support for about a year. So keeping the Kubernetes versions in Tanzu up to date is highly recommended.
Step 1 – Update vCenter
This step is not mandatory, but recommended. Updates on vCenter are often accompanied by a new Kubernetes versions. You can see notifications about updates in the vSphere Client.
Added Network Security Policy support for VMs deployed via VM operator service – Security Policies on NSX-T can be created via Security Groups based on Tags. It is now possible to create NSX-T based security policy and apply it to VMs deployed through VM operator based on NSX-T tags.
Supervisor Clusters Support Kubernetes 1.22 – This release adds the support of Kubernetes 1.22 and drops the support for Kubernetes 1.19. The supported versions of Kubernetes in this release are 1.22, 1.21, and 1.20. Supervisor Clusters running on Kubernetes version 1.19 will be auto-upgraded to version 1.20 to ensure that all your Supervisor Clusters are running on the supported versions of Kubernetes.
Check before update
If you upgraded vCenter Server from a version prior to 7.0 Update 3c and your Supervisor Cluster is on Kubernetes 1.9.x, the tkg-controller-manager pods go into a CrashLoopBackOff state, rendering the guest clusters unmanageable
The image above indicates we’re already on version 1.21, which is good for an update.
Update
Before updating your VCSA make sure you have a configuration backup! An optional VM snapshot is a good idea too. It might help to revert settings fast in case something goes wrong.
You can either apply the update from VAMI or from the shell. The image below shows an overview of the new packages with this update.
After the update is installed you will have an option to deploy a new Kubernetes version in your Supervisor Control Plane.
This blogpost was under embargo until 28th of September 2021 8:00am (PT) / 17:00 (CEST). The fact that you can read this now means that vSphere 7 Update 3 has (probably) already been released.
[Update 29th Sept 2021]: Download is not yet available. Maybe we need to wait until VMworld2021 next week.
What’s New
VMware vSphere 7 Update3 comes with a wide range of innovations. They can be categorized into the sections below:
Tanzu with Kubernetes
Lifecycle, Upgrade and Patching
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Resource Management
Availability & Resiliency
Security & Compliance
Guest OS and Workloads
Storage
Networking
vSphere Management & APIs
Another bunch of features goes into vSAN. But these features will be covered in an extra post.
