Check for Planned Downtime resulting from Reduced Downtime Upgrade (RDU) usage.

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

There is no issue - This KB details how to monitor for planned downtime to verify that a newly started operation would have the time to finish or for other reasons.

Environment

VCF 9.1

Resolution

Check the response by calling the vCenter Upgrade planned downtime endpoint directly on the vCenter that is being upgraded using root credentials. The sole parameter is the number of needed minutes and can be changed. It makes more sense to ask for a number of minutes less than 60 - for anything bigger the response is much more likely to change in time (as a new upgrade can be started by then). Do not use any other credentials to achieve optimal results:

curl 'https:///{Replace_with_vCenter_Hostname}/lcm/rest/vcenter/lcm/deployment/migration-upgrade/planned-downtime?duration=5' --header 'Authorization: Basic *******'

The result of the operation is a json block with the field "expected" and one of 3 possible values: YES, NO, or UNKNOWN, e.g.:

{
    "expected": "YES"
}

"Yes" means that RDU switchover is planned and expected to happen before the given time has passed - e.g. 5 minutes in this scenario. The user cannot expect a 5 minute operation to complete.

"No" means no planned downtime in the given time period. Operations can be triggered as normal.

"Unknown" means there is no scheduled switchover, however Upgrade is ongoing, and downtime could happen in the given time frame.