When you want to upgrade VMware vCloud Director 5.1 to version 5.5, VMware vCloud Networking and Security should be upgraded to 5.5 as well because vCloud Director 5.5 is not backward compatible with vShield 5.1. Unfortunately and surprisingly, the documentation on VMware website to do so is not accurate! and it took some time for me to realize what’s the correct procedure. So, I thought it would be useful to share it here for those who can’t find the things mentioned in VMware website to upgrade VMware vCloud till they modify the documentation.

Actually, the part which is not accurate is where it explains the steps to upgrade vShield Edge appliances and it is a crucial part because failing to do this will result in failure in managing Edge gateways through vCloud Director interface. Since there would be one vShield Edge system appliance for each Edge Gateway that is created in Virtual Data Centers, you will have considerable number of vShield Edges in your environment and you should take care of them one by one. By the way, after upgrading vShield Manager to 5.5 is done (it’s easy, just uploading the upgrade bundle in vShield web console and reboot), the most important one is Upgrading vShield Edge.

Let’s look at the document on VMware website: Best practices for upgrading to VMware vCloud Networking and Security 5.5 , it says:

If you have vShield Edge 5.1.0 or later instances, upgrade each Edge:

1. Log in to the vSphere Client.
2. Click the data center for which vShield Edge instances are to be upgraded.
3. Click the Network Visualization tab. All existing vShield Edge instances are shown in the listings page. An arrow icon is shown for each vShield Edge that must be updated.
4. Click an Edge and click Upgrade from Actions to start the upgrade. When the Edge is upgraded, the arrow icon no longer appears.
5. Repeat for each vShield that must be upgraded

After logging in to vSphere client, you will notice that there is no “Network Visualization” tab, but instead “Network Virtualization” tab. It must be a typo but even after clicking on “Network Virtualization” you will face some errors complaining about not having Acrobot Adobe Reader and so on! While the proper way to do this is to Log in to vShield Manager Web console (not vSphere Client) and look for Network Virtualization (instead of Visualization) under your DataCenter and the rest of steps are the same. You need to choose each Edge, select “Actions” on the top and choose “Upgrade” which will result in an automatic upgrade of that special Edge Gateway to new version.

I hope they modify their document because it is considered as the most reliable one.