I noticed today some of our clusters had very old versions of Nutanix Life Cycle Manager (LCM) installed so thought I would put together a blog post on how to upgrade the LCM component while I was doing it. It is pretty straight forward and a nice thing to keep up to date as features and hardware compatibility keeps getting added with every new version.
The first step would be to read through the latest LCM release documentation to find out the latest version and what features & improvements have been made. It is also important to check the version compatibility with your cluster. What is nice is LCM has been decoupled from the normal Nutanix AOS updates path so it can be upgraded independently from AOS. It is also a standalone component so can be updated at anytime without causing any outage. Check the Nutanix Portal for the latest docs here
- Log onto Prism Element of the Nutanix Cluster that needs to be upgraded and click the config cog in the top right and click ‘Life Cycle Manager’
- Choose ‘Inventory’ the click ‘Options’ – note only one component is showing in the Inventory at the moment
- From Options click in ‘Advanced Settings’
- The dialog box will show the version of LCM the updates are being pulled from. Edit the number to the version in the URL. The latest version is 1.3 so in the example below replace the ‘x’ with a 3 then ‘Save’. I have found that jumping from version 1.0 to 1.3 fails so I would recommend going to 1.2 first then onto 1.3.
- Once version is saved click on the ‘Perform Inventory’ option. This will pull down the new version of the LCM component
- Progress of the task will be shown like the screenshot below
- Once the Inventory is complete click in ‘Available Updates’. A new version should be available so click on the LCM component to select and then click ‘Update Selected’
- Note the version that the LCM component will be updated to and ‘Save Selection’
- At this point the update can be applied. The LCM service will be restarted during the update but no outage will be experienced to the cluster as LCM is a separate component to the cluster. Apply the update by clicking the box
- Progress of the update can monitored in LCM and also in Prism Element if you need to exit out of LCM
- Once the update is complete run another ‘Perform Inventory’ to get the latest software & firmware versions for the newly installed LCM version
- Once complete look at the Inventory tab and now there more components are captured in the inventory
- Looking at the ‘Available Updates’ now will likely show more component that have available updates.
Now it is time to start planning some software and firmware updates. Personally I would recommend a maintenance window for this type of work in case anything goes wrong. When running the update LCM will update each host at a time and move VMs around to maintain 100% availability but once you are happy with the process it is best to be cautious.
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