With VMware Cloud Director 10.1.1 VMware introduced support for NSX-T 3.0 and vSphere7.
Motivated by the new supported version I considered to update my lab from vSphere 6.7 U3 and NSX-V to vSphere 7.
After studying the Interoperability matrix, I noticed that vSphere 7 does not support NSX-V. As a consequence, you cannot directly upgrade from vSphere 6.7 and NSX-V to vSphere 7 and NSX-T. In the follwoing I want to high level describe how to update a VCD and vSphere 6.7 environment with NSX-V to vSphere 7.
Interoperability checks
If you would like to update an environment from vSphere 6.x and NSX-V to vSphere 7 in combination with VMware Cloud Director 10.1.1. First of all, you have to ensure that your planned version are compatible with each other. Therefore, you have to check the VMware interoperability matrix very carefully. You will notice that vSphere 7 does not support NSX-V.
As a consequence, you cannot upgrade directly from vSphere 6.7 U3 to vSphere 7 in a VCD environment using NSX-V. Therefore, you have to check the vSphere 6.x compatibility with NSX-T:
How to upgrade from vSphere 6.7 U3 and NSX-V to vSphere 7
As mentioned above, you cannot upgrade directly from vSphere 6.7 U3 and NSX-V to vSphere 7 in a VMware Cloud Director environment. Therefore, I recommend the following method:
- Check the Interoperability matrix if NSX-T 3.0 is supported by your vSphere/ESXi version
- If necessary, update vSphere/ESXi to a version supported by NSX-T 3.0
- Install and configure NSX-T 3.0
- Add the vCenter server that you want to migrate to vSphere 7 as Compute Manager in NSX-T (This is very important because the NSX-V to NSX-T migration tool can only migrate VM/vApps within the same vCenter server! See https://fojta.wordpress.com/2020/04/15/how-to-migrate-vcloud-director-from-nsx-v-to-nsx-t/)
- Migrate VMs from NSX-V to NSX-T
- Upgrade vSphere/ESXi
I highly recommend to have a look at Tom Fojita´s great blog post “How to Migrate VMware Cloud Director from NSX-V to NSX-T“!
Conclusion
You cannot upgrade in a VMware Cloud Director environment with vSphere 6.x and NSX-V directly to vSphere 7. You have to migrate from NSX-V to NSX-T first and vSphere/ESXi afterwards.