Recently, VMware released NSX-T 2.5 with a lot of new features and improvements I know everyone is wanting.  I know being one of those people I had to upgrade NSX-T from 2.4.0 in my production environment to 2.5.  This is my walk through of upgrading from 2.4.0 to 2.5.0.  I must admit the upgrade assistant on NSX is really sweet and made the entire upgrade process smooth and flawless.  Not  a lot to say so let’s get right into the upgrade how to.

Pre-Reqs:

• Minimum 6.5 build is 13004031 which is ESXi 6.5 Express Patch 13        
• Minimum vCenter Appliance 6.5 U2d
• vCenter 6.7 U3 Appliance supported but need existing NSX-T environment at 2.4.2

During Upgrade

• During the NSX Edge upgrade, you might experience the following traffic interruption:
• North-south datapath is affected if the NSX Edge is part of the datapath.
• East-west traffic between tier-1 routers using NSX Edge firewall, NAT, or load balancing.
• Temporary Layer 2 and Layer 3 interruption.
• Configuration changes are not blocked on NSX Manager but might be delayed.

Limitations on In-Place Upgrade

For NSX-T Data
Center, in-place upgrade of a host is not supported in the following scenarios:

• More than one N-VDS switch is configured on the host.
• More than 100 vNICs are configured on the host N-VDS switch.
• ENS is configured on the host N-VDS switch.
• CPU use for the hostd, nsxa, or the config-agent service is high.
• vSAN(with LACP) is configured on the host N-VDS switch.
• VMkernel interface is configured on the overlay network.

Adhere to the
following upgrade paths for each NSX-T Data Center release version.

• NSX-T Data Center 2.3 > NSX-T Data Center 2.5.
• NSX-T Data Center 2.4 > NSX-T Data Center 2.5.

Additional Pre-Checks:

1 Identify and record the administrative user IDs and passwords.
2 Verify that you can log in to the NSX Manager web user interface.
3 Check the Dashboard, system overview, host transport nodes, edge transport nodes, NSX Edge cluster, transport nodes, HA status of the edge, and all logical entities to make sure that all the status indicators are green, deployed, and do not show any warnings.
4 Validate North-South connectivity by pinging out from a VM.
5 Validate that there is an East-West connectivity between any two VMs in your environment.
6 Record BGP states on the NSX Edge devices.
#get logical-routers
#vrf SR
#get bgp
#get bgp neighbor

Let the upgrade begin:

Go to System >
Upgrade

Select Upload MUB
file and browse to wherever you stored the Vmware-NSX-upgrade-bundle-2.5.0.0.0.14663074.mub

Begin Upgrade

Continue

This part takes
several minutes

Run pre-checks

Must upgrade in order from left to right
Each tab must finish upgrading before you can upgrade the next set of components
Start

Monitor progress –
FYI you can click MORE INFORMATION in blue to see the logs and monitor the
upgrade step by step

Once done click Run
Post Checks and then move on to hosts

Start
Puts each host in maintenance mode one at a time and upgrades bits
Click more information to view logs

When done click on
Run Post Checks before moving onto Management Nodes

Start to begin last
stage of the upgrade

Eventually upgrade status message will appear
Wait 5 minutes then reload the page
Can ping the VIP to see when final manager is back online

Log in as admin

Finishing monitoring
upgrade

When upgrade
finished Run Post Checks

Congrats it is finished
Can click show upgrade history to confirm success of upgrade

Summary:
As you can see upgrading NSX has come a long way since it’s humble beginnings.  I hope this article was useful and helps everyone understand how easy it is to upgrade NSX-T to 2.5.