One click upgrade – Nutanix Operaiting System upgrade

The biggest operational pain point in standard 3 Tier architecture was (and still is) maintenance. Regardless if it was Hypervisor upgrade\update or firmware update. As for now, to perform upgrade usually one has to:

• go vendor or vendors website, check hardware vs firmware vs hypervisor for all components
  • BIOS version
  • HBA firmware and drivers
  • NIC firmware and drivers
  • supported hypervisor version
  • and so on and so on
• download all necessary binaries
• create dependency list
• install one by one from several different management consoles

At the end if one is lucky and all went well mission is accomplished. Question is – how much time is your operational\engineering time spent on such trivial task like this ? Answer is – definitely to much  🙂 , days and days of preparation work, plus next few days to to work.

That’s why Nutanix, in the NOS 4.X release bring one of the best features – One click upgrade. Where from single console you can upgrade not only Nutanix Operating System (NOS) but also:

• Hypervisor
  • ESXi
  • Hyper-V
  • KVM – gets upgraded while NOS upgrade
• Firmware
  • disks firmware – current release
  • NIC firmware – in the future releases
  • BIOS – in the future releases
  • IPMI firmware – in the future releases
• Tools
  • NCC – Nutanix cluster check

All above actions with ZERO downtime for virtual machines.

Heaving Nutanix you do not have to worry about compatibility matrix – we will do it for – what you have to do is just press few buttons and enjoy orchestrated upgrade 🙂

One click upgrade – Nutanix Operaiting System upgrade

• Log in to Prism UI
• Click on Gear button and upgrade software
• if your Nutanix cluster has internet connectivity – hit Download button or you can upload tarball with new version. All supported version are available on my.nutnaix.com

Nutanix upgrade 4.1

• Once download finished, click Upgrade button. You will find two sub-buttons, PreUpgrade and Upgrade Now. Pre-Upgrade will do check of all prerequisites upfront the upgrade.

Nutanix Upgrade NOS

• After, just wait and relax, software will do the job for you :-). One by one CVM will get upgraded and restarted – no need to worry about anything.

Nutanix upgrade process

If cluster is large enough and you have some spare time – you can play with build-in game 🙂

Nutanix build-in Game

An average upgrade time takes from 3 to 4 minutes per node. Upgrade speed might vary depends on hardware specs.

Nutanix upgrade complete