Dell VxRail 7.0.x Administration Guide

Upgrade workflow for LCM

For VxRail 7.0.450 and VxRail 8.0.110 and later updates, you can use the LCM workflow to provide planning, upgrade remediation (if needed), and execution and validation.

The LCM workflow includes a planning component and upgrade readiness indicator to improve upgrades.

For connected clusters, VxRail Manager automatically retrieves the recommended upgrade bundle information with the latest upgrade prechecks. Upgrade prechecks run every 24 hours against the wanted state of the target bundle. An upgrade readiness indicator displays green, yellow, or red to indicate the level of remediation that is required before the upgrade is attempted. Detailed upgrade precheck results are available in the Update Advisor Report. The Update Advisor Report describes the impact of updating to the target VxRail version.

The  Update Advisor Report is comprehensive and exportable and provides the following features:

• Cluster update readiness status
• Cluster update duration estimates
• Last VxRail backup insights
• Link to release notes
• Displays upgrade precheck outputs with KB links for remediation help
• Analysis of component-level drift
• Custom component information

See Generate the Update Advisor Report and Update Advisor Report for more information.

For unconnected clusters, go to Dell Support to download two small upgrade files from instead of the full upgrade bundle. To generate the Update Advisor Report, locate and download the files for the latest upgrade prechecks and the metadata file of the target bundle and then upload using the UI workflow in local update.

When the cluster is ready for an update, you must download a full upgrade bundle.

LCM modes

VxRail has two LCM modes which are abstracted by the VxRail API. The default LCM mode is through ESXCLI. For VxRail 7.0.240 and later, there are limited cases where VMware vLCM benefits. For VxRail 8.0.210 and later, additional use cases can leverage vLCM enablement for more capabilities.