Hi everyone, my name is Mark mcbrede, and I'm a customer success specialist. And in this session, we're going to walk through how to upgrade the Cisco Intersight private virtual appliance.00:08Whether you're running this in an air gapped data center or a secure on prem environment, the goal here is to give you a clear, repeatable process so your upgrade goes smoothly from start to finish. Let's get into it.00:201st I'll give a quick refresher on the private virtual appliance itself, what it is, and where it fits. Then we'll spend the bulk of our time on how to prepare for the upgrade, which will help you to plan for a successful upgrade. And finally, we'll move into a live demo so you can see the process in action. So let's.00:35Let's start with the appliance itself.00:55The Cisco Intersight private Virtual Appliance is a fully on prem disconnected deployment of Intersight. It runs entirely within your environment, giving you a single secure gateway to manage your infrastructure, and it scales to thousands of devices.01:00From a single appliance, you can manage a broad range of Cisco infrastructure such as your UCSX series, B series, and C series servers, your MDS, and Nexus switches for networking and storage and converge and hyper converged platforms such as flexpod, flash stack.01:17Hitachi and Cisco Compute hyper converged with Nutanix. The key takeaway is that the PVA brings the management capabilities of Intersight into an environment that for security or operational reasons must stay completely on prem.01:37The PVA is designed for an environment where connectivity isn't an option. Air gap deployments where data sovereignty and isolation are critical requirements. You'll find it deployed across the edge, campus, and branch sites co location facilities, and the data center, and.01:56Importantly, even though it's disconnected, the private virtual appliance shares a common set of features with intersight SaaS and the connected virtual appliance. You still get cross architecture operations, policy based configurations, firmware management, the hardware compatibility list, advisory.02:16These and drag and drop automation.02:36So you're not giving up functionality by staying on prem. You're getting that same inter site operational model within your isolated environment. So now on to preparing for the upgrade. Taking care of these four steps up front can be what makes a difference between.02:39A clean upgrade and having to troubleshoot unexpected problems.02:591st, review the inter site Appliance Help Center page. This is where you can confirm your supported upgrade path, and that matters because depending on your current version, you may need to step through an intermediate release rather than jumping straight to their target release. The Help Center also shows.03:04What's new with each release and which issues have been resolved. Second, download your upgrade files early. These files can be large, so pre staging them either locally or on a network share that the appliance can reach can save you valuable time during your maintenance window.03:24And 3rd, protect your appliance before making any changes, take a VM snapshot and a full appliance backup. This will give you a clean rollback point if you ever need it. And 4th, be sure to schedule adequate time for the upgrade.03:43The upgrade can take a couple of hours or longer, so plan your maintenance window accordingly and give yourself room to work without pressure. Take care of these four things up front, and you'll set yourself up for a clean successful upgrade. So now let's move into the demo where I'll walk you through what we've discussed.04:01Let's take a look.04:21So the 1st thing we'll do is log into our appliance and confirm what version we're running. So once we're logged in, there's actually a couple of places that we can go to verify.04:26By what version that we're running. We can go on the left hand side and we can go to appliance details.04:46And here we can see that we are running version one.one.5-zero. If we go to appliance updates, you can also see here the the running version of our appliance. So what we can do from here is head on over to the appliance center help page to see what.04:53Versions are available for upgrading.05:13Okay, we're now over to Intersight.com/help/appliance/home. And here we can go to what's new, and then we can go to private virtual appliance. And here we can see the latest release that's available one.one.7-zero.05:18Here we can also see the recommendations on being able to upgrade to this version. So we can see that when upgrading to the software release ensure that your appliance is running on software release version one.one.4-zero or higher. In our case, we're running one.one.five, so we can do the upgrade from one.05:37Dot one.five to one.one.seven. Here we could also see additional information on what are the enhancements on this version of the appliance to show what new hardware is being supported. We can also see things around whatever issues or or P certs that may have been resolved in this ver.05:57Version of the appliance as well. So this is a really good page to confirm the version that you're upgrading to. So now when you created.06:17And set up your private virtual appliance, you would have also created a inter site account to be able to download your software. So here we can see on the page that is used for the private virtual appliance, we can see under appliance software, the versions that are available for download to be able to upgrade your private virtual appliance.06:26So we're gonna upgrade to version one.one.seven. And as you can see this is a large file, so you'll want to make sure to download this ahead of time and copy it over to your environment. In our case, we've already got it downloaded and copied to the environment that we're gonna do the appliance upgrade on.06:46We're now back at the appliance and before we kick off our upgrade, let's go ahead and take a snapshot of our virtual machine. We'll go ahead and take a snapshot in case we run into any issues during the upgrade and we need to revert back.07:10Oh, Alright, so now we have a snapshot of our virtual machine. Let's go ahead and kick off appliance backup. So we'll go to under settings and then backups, and we'll do create.07:30Backup, then we'll give it a remote host that our backup will be sent to, the path.07:50Then we'll give it a file name, then we'll give it the credentials to be able to log into our backup destination.08:08Go ahead and click start backup, then we'll give it a minute for this backup to complete before.08:39I kick off the upgrade.08:44Okay, we can now see that our backup has successfully completed.09:00So now we'll go to appliance updates and then we're gonna choose install updates. So we're gonna use the file that's on our local machine to do the upgrade, so this is the file we downloaded from the private virtual appliance Intersight account. We've got it saved here on our desktop, we're upgrading.09:05Into version one.one.seven. So select our file, click next. We can choose to install now or if we wanted to schedule this for later, we can select the installation time to schedule this for later.09:25We'll click apply, and then we can see that the installation schedule has been successfully committed. So what's gonna happen now is that the file that we selected is gonna be uploaded to the appliance to be used for the upgrade. So this will take a couple of minutes.09:48Here we can see that the file upload has completed successfully. So from here.10:24We can continue to monitor the progress of the upgrade. We'll give it a second for the progress bar to show up here. Let me take a minute to refresh. We can now see in the request tab that the action to import.10:37The image is currently in progress. For additional information on the running tasks, we can select import image and we can see all of the tasks that it is running through.10:57The import image workflow has now completed successfully.11:16From the appliance updates page, we can now monitor the progress while the update is running in the background.11:35Keep in mind, this process will take some time to complete, so continue to monitor this page until the upgrade is completed.11:48The upgrade has now completed and on the appliance updates page we can confirm on the update status that it shows that the upgrade has completed. We can also go back to the appliance details page and confirm that our health is now in a healthy state where it's a green operational state, and we can confirm the version that we're running on.12:21When we upgraded to version one.one.seven.12:42Thanks for watching.12:46
