vSphere Integrated Containers 1.4 - Upgrade 3/3

Finally, we get to the last step on this journey of upgrading my environment to the latest and greatest vSphere Integration Containers so far.

Today I'll upgrade my Virtual Container Host, VCH, to version 1.4

VCH management and lifecycle actions, like upgrades, are performed through the use of VIC Engine Bundle.

If you haven't that available yet or is using an older version, grab it now.

Engine Bundle can be found on the VIC Getting Start page (https://VIC:9443)

Unpack the binaries from Engine bundle tar file;

Run: tar -zxf vic_1.4.0.tar.gz

Check the VCH version on your environment;

Run: vic-machine ls

As you can see it’s running version 1.3 and has one container running.

The amazing thing about VIC is that interruptions, like upgrades, to VCH, does not cause any outage to the containers, basically because they are running independently as container-vms;

if you are using NAT based port forwarding then communication will be briefly interrupted but if you are using the exclusive VIC feature, Container Network, you are in good shape them.

Now that we know the ID of our VCH we can upgrade it.

Execute the vic-machine upgrade command and specify the VCH's ID we just got from the previous step.
Run: vic-machine upgrade --id "VCH_ID"

In less than 3 minutes my VCH has been upgraded to version 1.4 and as you can see my container kept running for the entire process.

WHAT ABOUT MY CONTAINERS ???

There’s no process to upgrade your running containers !!!

Containers are ephemeral by nature, so if you want a newer version, delete it and create a new one. Welcome to the container world !!!!

VIC containers are based on Photon OS, and with VIC 1.4 comes a new bootstrap.iso version; don't get too excited, it was not this time it got upgraded to version 2.0, but it got some nice minor packages updates.

So any previous container will still be running the old Photon OS version but the new ones will get the new bootstrap.iso version.

For comparison, I just run a new container based on the same image and compared the OS versions.

That’s all folks there are no more excuses to be running an older VIC version if you still unsure about why to upgrade, take a look at the complete list of what's new.

See you