VSPHERE 6 – vRealize Orchestrator Upgrade

The last in this series of posts surrounding the lab upgrade to vSphere 6.0 will be for vRealize Orchestrator. This component disappeared from view in my web client following the upgrade to vCenter Server 6.0u1, which was expected from prior inspection of the compatibility matrix at https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/sim/interop_matrix.php. We are going to need to get this component upgraded as well in order to utilize this is my new environment.

In the several weeks since I started upgrading my lab with the first post (between work, my two toddlers, and playing The Division on XBOX ONE, there has sadly been little time for my lab L), VMware released version 6.0u2, which I went ahead and patched my hosts to in the ESXi upgrade post.

Along with 6.0u2 came a newer version of vRealize Orchestrator as well, with the newest release being at version 7.0.1. This is the version we will be going to in this post.

LAB ENVIRONMENT

As a reminder, my lab components are in the below matrix. This is the last component requiring an upgrade to vSphere 6 – the others have all been covered in prior posts.

UPGRADE STEPS

Unlike the vSphere Replication upgrade, this one can indeed be updated from within the Web Management console for the appliance.

Log in with root credentials to your appliance at https://vro:5480.

Navigate to the Update tab.

Select “Check Updates” to get a fresh upgrade list. The latest build should appear for installation.

Click “Install Updates”.

Accept the EULA.

Process with the update.

The upgrade process will begin straight from the Web Management console.

It took about 10 minutes for my upgrade process to complete. There is no progress bar or any indication that things are moving along…. I literally stared at the above graphic for the 10 minutes before the web page went to the following.

Sweet. Initiate a reboot by navigating to the System tab.

I prefer to watch the console of the appliance during reboot following an upgrade. Any immediate issues are often visible on the console as the init scripts are firing off.

If there are no issues, the appliance should end up at the login screen showing the newly minted version number.

POST UPGRADE CONFIGURATION

Following the upgrade, you will have to reconfigure the authentication settings of the appliance now that we are leveraging the Platform Services Controller (PSC) in vSphere 6.0.

There are some architectural differences in vRO v7 as well as a revamped UI for administering the tool. Log into https://vro:8283/vco-controlcenter to access the new revamped UI. As before, you can use the root credentials for the appliance to access this page.

Once authenticated select the nifty new “Validate Configuration” button for a one stop shop to check the health of the various configuration options for the appliance.

All configuration items from my 5.5 Appliance appear to be healthy with the exception of “Authentication”. Click the hyperlink for “Authentication” to reconfigure the component.

One of the changes to v7 of vRO is that the old way of authenticating directly though SSO is now deprecated, and this method is labeled “SSO Legacy”. Rather than going ahead fixing this configuration, in my environment I am changing over to authenticate through the PSC proxy. Click “Unregister” to clear out the bunk SSO config.

Proceed with entering the Administrative credentials relating to the old SSO config, and complete the un-registration.

Once this is done, from the drop down change the selection to simply “vSphere”.

Enter the host name for the system running the PSC, and connect.

Arrgh! Error.

We still need to import the newly minted PSC Self Signed SSL certificate. Go back to the Home page and select “Certificates”.

Select “Import” and the “Import from URL” drop down.

Enter the host name of the PSC, and select “Import”.

Accept the SSL cert.

Once this trust is set up, navigate back to the “Authentication” page. Re select “vSphere” from the drop down, and re-enter the host name PSC. Attempt to connect again now that our cert has been imported.

We now get the connection and are prompted for the administrative credentials that the appliance will use to connect to our PSC. Enter the appropriate creds for your environment, and register the configuration.

Once registered, the last step is to define an Admin Group for the appliance. Select this and save the configuration.

Almost complete! The Control Center asks that a restart of the service be performed to effect the change.

Go ahead and restart.

Once the services have been restarted, revisit the “Validate Configuration” page.

All items should now show GREEN.

Very sweet.

RUN VCENTER CONFIGURATION WORKFLOW

Now that our authentication is sorted out, we will need to run the canned v7 workflow to re-register the newly upgraded Orchestrator appliance with vCenter.

To run this workflow, navigate to https://vro:8281/vco, and select the java webstart link in order to launch the orchestrator application.

Save the java webstart file and open it.

Once the java application loads, log in with an SSO account from the Administrator Group that was selected during the configuration step above.

Navigate to the “Library” tab and expand the workflows for vCenter.

Expand the “Configuration” folder, and right click the “Register vCenter Orchestrator as a vCenter Server Extension”.

Launch the workflow.

Select the vCenter to which the Orchestrator service should be registered.

Submit the workflow.

The job should complete in a few seconds without error.

The documentation says to restart vCenter after this registration, so go ahead and restart the vCenter service at this time.

TEST WORKFLOW FROM WEB CLIENT

Finally, let’s test out how the upgraded Orchestrator is functioning within the web client.

Log in to the web client as a user from the Adminstrators group that we configured above in the authentication section, and navigate to the “Orchestrator” plugin.

Select the “vRO Servers” tab to verify our appliance is present.

We should see the Orchestrator appliance registered.

Good times. Let’s launch a workflow against a VM.

Navigate to the VM and Template’s view, and right click a VM to see the contextual Orchestrator workflows that are linked to the VM object. Select the “Migrate Virtual Machine with vMotion” workflow.

Since this is the first time we are launching a workflow after the re-registration process, approve the provision of the SSO token to the Orchestrator appliance.

The workflow wizard will launch. Fill out the necessary fields and click “Finish” to launch the workflow immediately.

Check the tasks to ensure that the newly upgraded and re-configured Orchestrator is indeed able to launch the job.

CONCLUSION

This completes the upgrade of my lab components to vSphere 6.0. I am happy to have the lab finally at the latest rev, and look forward to begin playing with all the feature sets of vSAN and NSX that are only available on version 6.0+.