Upgrading Nutanix Prism Central

Introduction

If you want to start taking advantage of some of the new features of Prism Central 5.5 like, Dynamic alerting, VM right-sizing, and scheduled reporting then you will need to update it.

Here is the AOS 5.5 video from the Nutanix nu.school channel

Documents

Here are the links to the Prism Central Documents

Release notes here

Prism Central Admin guide here

Upgrade guide is contained in the Admin guide. I would recommend reading it before starting your upgrade.

Procedure

I have put together a step by step upgrade guide for Prism Central.

First thing to know about is Nutanix now have a separate upgrade binary that is different from the normal AOS upgrade. Ensure you use that software cause it may cause you big problems.

• Take a snapshot of the Prism Central machine so you have a roll back option should anything go wrong
• Log onto the Prism Central web console. Make sure there aren’t alerts or issues in the cluster. I would usually run NCC checks as well before any update.
• Go to the ‘settings cog’ then click ‘Upgrade Prism Central’
• Click ‘upload the Prism Central binary’
• Click ‘Choose File’ for the Metadata and Binary files. In each case browse to where they were downloaded and choose the file and click ok. Once complete it should look like the below. Click on ‘Upload Now’

• The upgrade file will start to be uploaded. Time for this to complete can vary depending on your connection to and location from the Prism Central server

• This step is optional but I will usually run the ‘Pre-upgrade’ to ensure that the everything checks out before starting the Upgrade for real

• Pre-upgrade task running

• Pre-upgrade task completed successfully. I usually run Pre-Upgrade checks when I am uploading new software but I’m not carrying out the upgrade straight away. Doing this identifies any issues in advance so there are no delays when it comes to running the upgrade in anger

• If everything checks out then click the ‘Upgrade Now’ option. If not look into the problem. Nutanix KBs can be useful to find a solution or you might need to raise a support call with Nutanix

• The Pre-upgrade steps will run again as part of the upgrade

• When I was updating I was kicked out of the Prism Central Web GUI. I opened up a KVM to the Prism Central VM to monitor what was happening. Below is the last few lines of the upgrade

• Once the upgrade is complete it will take 5 mins or so for all the services to come up. If you like you can log onto the Prism Central and run a ‘Cluster Status’ to see the services come up
• One thing to be aware of once the upgrade is completed is that Prism Central 5.5 now uses only User Principal Name (UPN) credentials. UPNs are typically a user’s email address

• Once logged in go back to ‘settings cog’ then click ‘Upgrade Prism Central’. Here you can make sure Prism Central is on the version expected