Upgrade from DCE 7.8.1 in hyper-v to DCE 8.1.1

[jzurera]

Hi,

we have seen that DCE 8.1.1 now is supported in Hyper-V. We have an installation with DCE 7.8.1 in Hyper-V that we could not upgrade previously to the latest versions because they were not supported in Hyper-V. 

Can we upgrade this DCE 7.8.1 to DCE 8.1.1? 

[Gabi]

Hello,

you cannot upgrade directly...you must go through 7.9/8.0(from 7.9 there is a major change since now they are using Rocky linux)

so you need to backup actual 7.8.1, install 7.9.0, upgrade to 7.9.1, 7.9.2, 7.9.3, 8.0.0,8.1.1 and after you can restore a backup on a Hyper-V DCE 8.1.1

[JLehr · Accepted solution]

Hi @jzurera,

You could try to create a backup and then follow the upgrade path to 8.1.1, but it is untested since support for Hyper-V was introduced in 8.1.1.

You could also:

1. Create a backup and import it to a VMware-deployed DCE.
2. Follow the upgrade path to 8.1.1 in a VMware environment.
3. Restore that backup to a fresh 8.1.1 Hyper-V VM, making sure that the MAC address of the new 8.1.1 Hyper-V image is the same as your original 7.8.1 Hyper-V image.

[jzurera]

Hi, we tried last year to upgrade from CentOs to Rocky Linux in Hyper-V and it did not work. The procedure that you indicate is the way we thought we could do this upgrade, thanks for the confirmation. I dreamt that with a new release compatible with Hyper-V a new procedure was developed to migrate directly from the latest version compatible with Hyper-V to the new one.

[Lincoln_Darran]

Just got really excited after realising that there was finally a truly supported version of DCE on Hyper-V.

Thoroughly crushed to discover that there's no upgrade path from 7.8.1 though.

Come on support. Not everyone has a VMWare host kicking around to spin up the Rocky based version of the the OVA.

We have a lot of investment in DCE.  This isn't a big ask 😞

[Gabi]

Hello,

@jzurera you can not do an upgrade in Hyper-V because 8.1 is the first version supported in Hyper-V....so use the steps from above

@Lincoln_Darran you can use ESXI free version installed on any kind of server 

[Lincoln_Darran]

Hi @Gabi,

That statement isn't correct.  We've been running 7.8.1 on Hyper-V for a number of years, because we had no ESX infrastructure and migrated from a dead physical appliance with the help of support.

There should be an upgrade tool/path.

[Cory_McDonald]

Hello @Lincoln_Darran,

Although you may have been running Data Center Expert deployed on Hyper-V for a number of years, it wasn't designed to be deployment as a Hyper-V VM and was unsupported from a technical support / engineering perspective.  The only VM deployment that was supported prior to DCE 8.1.0 was VMware ESXi.

There is no upgrade tool to go from a unsupported Hyper-V deployment as it is an unsupported deployment.  If you are unable to deploy 7.9.0 on VMware ESXi, an available option would be to deploy 8.1.0 on Hyper-V and perform the configuration again while the 7.8.1 is operational for a period of time.  Unfortunately this can be very manual depending on the size of your deployment.  This would also mean that no historical data will be on your new deployment of 8.1.0 as no restore is being done.

Regards,

Cory

[Lincoln_Darran]

How would we transfer licences in this instance, if there's no way to restore the configuration backup?

[Cory_McDonald]

Hello @Lincoln_Darran,

Please reach out to technical support for licensing tasks such as migration.  They will need to verify your software support contracts and then they can perform the need license migrations.

Kind Regards,

Cory

[jzurera]

Hi,

we have tried to upgrade from DCE 7.8.1 in Hyper-V to 7.9.0 in VMware following this steps:

1. Full Backup from DCE 7.8.1 done
2. OVA 7.9.0 deployed in a VMware 
3. Restore the backup from DCE 7.8.1 in DCE 7.9.0

After that, the virtual machine does not start because the MAC address has changed. We cannot set the same MAC Address in VMware that the customer has in Hyper-V, VMware does not allow these range of Hyper-V addresses to be configured.

These are some screenshots of the procedure and the failure:

When we restore we receive this message:

And after the restore we receive this message:

We thought we could restore a backup from DCE 7.8.1 in 7.9.0 even the MAC address is different. We have tried in different ESXs and always the same result. This is one of them:

Any suggestion?

[Cory_McDonald]

Hello @jzurera,

A backup should be able to be taken from any DCE physical or virtual and deployed on another VM without that error message occurring, so I am not sure what is happening with your instance.  I would recommend reaching out to technical support to see if there is a work around to get that backup deployed in VMware so you can finish with your upgrade and migration back to Hyper-V.

Kind Regards,

Cory

[Gabi]

Hello, @jzurera 

edit virtual switch on esxi in order to accept mac address changes

[Fgrieco]

Helo @Gabi . Changes to the mac address are posible, but with the limitations of vmware and that is not usefull for this case.  

[jzurera]

HI @Gabi ,

we can change the MAC Addreess but with a specific format, we cannot set the same mac address that DCE had in hyper-v:

[Gabi]

Hello @jzurera, @Fgrieco,

if you want to change it, you can 🙂 ......leave the book and search on vmware community regarding ingnoring mac address check(tested on 7u2 and still working)

also @jzurera  change mac address after deploy ova and before power on machine......after that, DCE not accepting changes on mac address

[Fgrieco]

Gabi, the book is useful for your first answer, which was in the wrong direction. Your second post was more accurate and should have been the first (if you already knew). Anyway, thank you for your contribution. I am sharing the solution to this problem with others who may need it in the future.

[ATrabert]

@jzurera regarding your error with the mac address needing to be reset to the match the one in the backup, I've been able to replicate this error and it was result of rebooting the DCE server the restore had finished, even though both configuration/database were showing 100%.  

What happens is even they both say 100%, if you look at the restore log found in capturelogs, you'll see that the server is updating the mac address associated with every device/virtual sensor.  This took at least another 30-60 mins after it was at 100%

To resolve it, I deployed a new DCE server (or you could potentially revert to a vm snapshot taken before the restore), restored from back again and this time waited for the DCE server web page to say "restore complete, rebooting dce server".  This will take some time so just be patient and let the server run until it reboots on it's own.  Depending on the size of the backup, number of devices, virtual sensors, etc, this could take hours.

If after 24 hours, the restore is still running, it may be worth opening another browser tab, going to dce ip/capturelogs, and getting a log capture.  You should be able to extract it and find the restore log in /data/logs.  I would also suggest working with tech support regarding this.

[jzurera]

Finally we could upgrade from DCE 7.8.1 in Hyper-V to DCE 8.1.1 in Hyper-V with an ESX between these versions. 

The customer sent us a compressed backup 7.8.1 in format .dce and with this backup the restore did not work, sometimes problems with the MAC address, and even with the same MAC address in Hyper-V and in ESX, we could not restore a 7.8.1 compressed backup in DCE 7.9.0. 

Then he sent us another uncompressed backup and with this one it worked. We do not know if the problem was the compressed backup of maybe the file was corrupted.

These have been the steps:

1. Create an uncompressed backup from DCE 7.8.1 in Hyper-V
2. Deploy a new virtual machine in ESX with OVA 7.9.0 (with the same MAC address)
3. Restore backup from DCE 7.8.1 in DCE 7.9.0 
4. Upgrade from 7.9.0 in ESX to 8.1.1
5. Backup of 8.1.1 in ESX
6. Deploy a new virtual machine in Hyper-V with 8.1.1 with the same MAC address
7. Restore the ESX backup 8.1.1 in the Hyper-V 8.1.1

Around 6 hours the full upgrade process.

[ATrabert]

I've seen issues with compressed backups in the past and this option was removed in DCE 7.9.3 or 8.0

I did want to clarify that you do not have to re-use the existing DCE mac address when restoring a DCE backup to another virtual DCE server.  I've done this numerous times and on the most recent versions without an issue.

There are some benefits to re-using the mac address such as existing license keys working on the new server and DCE associations in ITA will not need to updated. However new license keys can be generated by tech support and in ITA 9.4.4, the DCE mac address in the ITA database can be updated via an API method