VMware SDDC VCF LCM Upgrade to 4.5.0.0

VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 went GA on Oct 11th 2022 and it comes with some pretty big enhancements, please check out the official VMware VCF 4.5 release notes for full details, however the following are what I think are the biggest improvements.

Migration enablement: This release introduces support for Mixed Mode migrations and supports new topologies for migration from VCF 3.x through 4.x

Support for VCF+: This release introduces support for subscription cloud services including vSphere+ and vSAN+. If you’re not familiar with vSphere+ read more here

SDDC Manager Onboarding Workflow: The SDDC Manager UI provides an easy, wizard-like interface for new users to configure their VCF deployment.

Operational improvements: Users can now rename clusters and apply user-defined tags to objects.

Storage improvements: With HCI Mesh, a cluster can mount a remote vSAN datastore that has been configured with another cluster (two or more clusters can share the same vSAN datastore).

The Bill of Materials (BOM) for VCF 4.5 is a following

In this article I’m going to demonstrate how to performa a skip level upgrade from VCF 4.4.0.0 to 4.5 (therefore skipping 4.4.1.0 and 4.4.1.1 as releases in between) and what was my experience doing so in a nested enviroment.

SDDC Manager 4.5

As usual, we need to start from a system precheck. Once we know it’s all looking healthy, we can start with the SDDC Manager upgrade from 4.4.0.0 to 4.5

Current version of my SDDC is as following:
Let’s go with the 4.5.0.0 bundle
Upgrading SDDC Manager to 4.5 (from 4.4.0.0 build 19312029)

So, after the SDDC Manager upgraded to 4.5.0.0 I started getting a new precheck warning which I had never seen before, about folder permissions checks on the filesystem. Interesting!

seems like we need to fix some permissions problems under /nfs/vmware/vcf/nfs-mount/bundle from vcf as owner to vcf_lcm


and… sorted 🙂
and here we go, prechecks are all happy now.


SDDC Manager 4.5 Config Drift Bundle

Configuration drift is a set of configuration changes applied to a brownfield VCF deployment  undergoing BOM upgrade, in order to bring its configuration on par with a greenfield VCF deployment. Configuration drift includes configuration changes required to BOM component/s (like VC, NSX-T, NSX-T Edge and ESXi) for example changing a property in HA configuration on a cluster, altering the relocation-standby mode for an NSX-T edge cluster or modifying  overlay transport zone name for NSX-T. The application of a configuration drift bundle on the management domain silently applies drift  on all domains. The configuration drift bundle is always sequenced as the second bundle to be the applied on the management domain after the application of the VCF service upgrade bundle and before applying any VMware software bundle (VC, NSX-T, ESXi).

which is usually very fast, in my nested lab it completed in just 5 minutes

NSX-T 3.2.1.2

Coming up next are the NSX-T upgrades, in this order:

  • NSX Upgrade Coordinator
  • NSX Edges
  • ESXi hosts
  • NSX=T Manager(s)

In my setup, I had edges with password closed to expiring but not actually expired. The first time I run the bundle, it failed trying to upgrade the edge cluster. To fix that, I had to either to mark as Resolved the expiring password warning in NSX-T Manager or perform an actual password reset.

So overall, it took 2 hours and 8 minutes, not bad considering I’m running everything in a single physical host.

vCenter Server 7.0 U3h

With VCF 4.5.0.0 there’s now a new warning message popping up in SDDC Manager before starting the vCenter bundle. It’s a reminder to backup the vCenter Server with the file-based method (see documentation).

So here I went and did from VAMI (vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface)

so this was fairly quick and painless 🙂


ESXi 7.0 U3g

It’s time for ESXi 7.0 U3g see full release notes https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/rn/vsphere-esxi-70u3g-release-notes.html

I do like to upgrade clusters in parallel so here’s it is:

overall, 7 nested hosts across 2 clusters took only 1 hour to upgrade.

vRealize Suite LifeCycle Manager

Just when I thought I was done, I noticed SDDC Manager was displaying the Management Workload Domain still being at 4.4.1 when in fact all the SDDC Manager services were at 4.5.0.0

Oh actually, it wasn’t the case! I forgot about vRSLCM appliance. As per VMware Cloud Foundation 4.5 release notes you must upgrade the vRSLCM to 8.8.2 or higher (following screenshot is from the release notes link)

In order to upgrade from vRSLCM 8.6.2 to 8.8.2 or higher in a VCF 4.5.0 environment, we must first install the Support Pack 4. This is clearly stated in the VMware vRealize Suite Lifecycle 8.6.2 PSPAK 4 Release Notes

In my setup, vRSLCM isn’t connected to internet so I’m going to follow the steps for offline installation.

Head over to https://customerconnect.vmware.com/patch and get the following patch:


Upload it to the vRSLCM VA under Settings > Product Support Pack and then Apply Version

Once the Product Support Pack is installed, I mounted VMware-vLCM-Appliance-8.8.2.3-20080494-updaterepo.iso onto the vRSLCM virtual machine and proceeded to upgrade
Prechecks looking good

and now that each BOM (part of the VCF deployed setup) is in line with VCF 4.5.0.0

That’s it! I hope you found this step by step article useful.

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