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Upgrading vSAN is a multistage process. Upgrading the XR4000 vSAN cluster software requires upgrading multiple components. Perform the following steps, in order, to upgrade your XR4000 vSAN cluster seamlessly.
After you have upgraded vCenter 7.x to vCenter 8.x (by performing the general upgrade procedure provided in the XR4000w installation manual), initiate a vLCM upgrade process for the compute node cluster. After the vSAN cluster compute nodes are upgraded to ESXi 8.x, perform the following section to change the ESXi 7.x based witness to an 8.x instance.
To switch a witness appliance from one version to another, do the following:
Note that the ESXi version running on the XR4000w remained ESXi 7.x as we updated the witness appliance running on top of XR4000w to vSphere ESXi 8.x You may upgrade XR4000w to ESXi 8.x as well by following the same process of vLCM used for compute nodes. When you attempt to upgrade ESXi 7.x running on XR4000w to ESXi 8.x via vLCM, it may fail with an image compatibility error as displayed below. The reason for this, is a couple of Dell software packages pre-installed on factory shipped ESXi 7.x are not compatible for ESXi 8.0. The software components are termed as ‘Dell OS Witness Module(dosaw) and ‘ACPI GPIO driver for managing GPIO (acpigpio)’. The software versions supported for ESXi 8.x will be available from Dell support page by December 2023.