One way of demonstrating the concept of ‘Invisible Infrastructure’ is the ability to complete a full system upgrade with minimal service interruption. In this post I will show the “One Click” upgrade facility that’s available on the Nutanix platform. This facility allows the admin to upgrade the Nutanix Operating System (NOS), the hypervisor, any required storage firmware and appropriate version of Nutanix Cluster Check (NCC) for the target NOS release.
You can choose to either upload the NOS upgrade tarball or have it automatically downloaded to a landing area. Just check the Enable Automatic Download box. Here I am uploading the software to the platform.
Similar to the NOS version, the hypervisor can also be upgraded to a newer version when available.
You can either select to run the preupgrade checks standalone without performing an upgrade or just select to upgrade directly, those same checks will be run before the start of the upgrade in any case.
Selecting upgrade will show the progress of the various stages of the upgrade as they occur. CVMs are upgraded sequentially and only one CVM is rebooted at a time. A CVM is always back in the cluster membership before the next CVM is restarted.
You can choose to upgrade the underlying hypervisor as well at this stage.
As always you can check progress in the Prism main window. Here we see the upgrade process has completed successfully.
Nutanix Prism also shows the individual task info ie task stage, CVM/host involved, time taken etc.
The Nutanix platform upgrade takes care of all the intermediate steps and just works, regardless of the size of the cluster. There’s minimal impact and disruption as the upgrade takes place and it enables you to carry out such tasks within normal working hours, and not losing a weekend to the usual rigours of a traditional hardware upgrade cycle.