Patching vRealize Automation is no less an effort. It needs planning and appropriate pre-requisite steps to be taken before one implements it.
vRealize Suite Life Cycle Manager eases this process by helping us to manage and patch vRA environments.
Now let's understand how we use vRLCM to patch vRA, In this case, I am using the following versions
vRA 7.5 GA which will be patched with HF16
vRLCM 2.1 Patch 2
Below screenshots shows my vRA environment managed by vRLCM
It's a vRealize Automation 7.5 environment
Before we start thinking about patching vRLCM provides us a feature to take a snapshot on the vRA environment being managed by it.
Note: It does not take a snapshot on the database node ( IAAS DB ), this is something we have to take manually.
Once the snapshots are taken head to Product Support pane and then download the patch we would like to apply. In our case, it would be vRealize Automation 7.5 HF16
Once the download is complete, we can now go ahead and start the patch installation process
Click on the three dots on the right side of the environment and then click on Patches --> History
This will not show anything as there are no patches installed currently.
Click on the three dots on the right side of the environment and then click on Patches -> Install Patch
Select the patch which is being installed, that's HF16, this is the only one we downloaded
Review and then click on Install
Under requests, you can see one for patching just started
Finally after a 1 hour and 7 minutes the patching completes
The request is marked as completed inside vRLCM
Same is seen in VAMI where the patch history pane would show that the environment is running on HF16
Then environment pane is updated as well
This is how a vRA environment is patched using vRLCM.
The logs we can use to monitor while this patch is being implemented are
vRA Appliance: MASTER node
/var/log/vmware/vcac/vcac-config.log
/var/log/messages
To filter only patch logs one can execute
tailf /var/log/vmware/vcac/vcac-config.log | grep -i cluster.patch
Note: Ensure timezone on the appliance is set to UTC, this is mandatory
Below .txt file has complete snippet right from the point the patch activity started and till the point, it's finished.
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