Upgrade legacy/cc-capable TKG clusters might not pick up desired OVA template if multiple OVA templates exist in vCenter with the same OS info and OVA version

Products

• VMware
• VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

If multiple templates with the same osinfo (os-name, os-arch, os-version) and ova-version exist in the same VC Datacenter, cluster upgrades might not pick up the desired ova template if not specified from cmd args.

 

The impacted versions are: 2.1.0, 2.1.1, 2.2.0, 2.3.0, 2.4.0

Environment

Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.6.0

Cause

If the customer has multiple OVAs in the vCenter that has a different path but the same osInfo and ova versions, i.e.: 
 

/PATH/vm/TKG-OVA-Templates/ubuntu-2004-efi-kube-v1.24.10+vmware.1

/PATH/vm/NEW-OVA-Template/ubuntu-2004-efi-kube-v1.24.10+vmware.1

 

And tanzu cli by default is picking the 1st one that matches the requirement (os-info,os-name,os-arch,ova-version).  If it is the second image that should be picked to upgrade the cluster, cluster upgrading would fail.

Resolution

Specify the flag --vsphere-vm-template-name with the full path of the target OVA to upgrade the mgmt and workload clusters.

# tanzu mc upgrade --vsphere-vm-template-name /PATH/vm/NEW-OVA-Template/ubuntu-2004-efi-kube-v1.24.10+vmware.1

# tanzu cluster upgrade <cluster-name> --vsphere-vm-template-name /PATH/vm/NEW-OVA-Template/ubuntu-2004-efi-kube-v1.24.10+vmware.1

 

With the commands above, the mgmt and workload clusters will be upgraded successfully with the correct OVA.

Notice that --vsphere-vm-template-name flag is a hidden flag and so far we did not officially announce support for this. 

Fix will be in 2.1.2, 2.2.1, 2.3.1, and 2.4.1 releases to reveal this flag

Additional Information