Convert vSphere Lifecycle Manager Mode in VCF

I recently had a customer who was unable to upgrade the Management Workload Domain in their VCF 4.3 deployment. After digging around for a while I found that the cluster was configured with vSphere Lifecycle Manager Images which is not compatible with the following features which they were using:

– Stretched Cluster

– Management Workload Domain

The Management Workload Domain must use vSphere Lifecycle Manager Baselines. That is also the case in with any clusters that are stretched.

I couldn’t find any procedure to change from vSphere Lifecycle Manager Images to vSphere Lifecycle Manager Baselines, and the customer had production workloads running in this cluster, so a redeploy was not a good option. VMware Support gave me the following procedure which did the trick:

The “lifecycleManaged” property needs to be changed to “false”. The lifecylceManaged property manipulations are provided via VMODL1 APIs:

1. Access the internal API through mob access using the URL: https://<vc_ip>/mob/&vmodl=

2. Navigate to the “content” property

3. Navigate to the “rootFolder” property

4. Navigate to the datacenter where the cluster is, using the datacenter list provided in the “childEntity” property

5. Navigate to the “hostFolder” property. This should list all the hosts and clusters within that datacenter you chose in Step 4

6. Navigate to the cluster that you wish to reset property on and check whether the URL still contains “&vmodl=1” at the end. The internal APIs get listed only when “&vmodl=1” is appended to the URL. At this stage verify if lifecycleManaged property is set to true at the onset

7. You should see the below two methods. Invoke the disableLifecycleManagement method and refresh to see if lifecyleManaged is set to false

void

disableLifecycleManagement

vim.LifecycleOperationResult

enableLifecycleManagement

8. If the cluster is vSphere HA enabled, please restart updatemgr and vpxd using below commands on the vCenter appliance:

vmon-cli -r updatemgr

vmon-cli -r vpxd

I strongly recommend doing the above fix together with VMware Support if you are working on a production environment.