Plan Upgrade in SDDC grayed out - "Workload domains must upgrade to prior to upgrading to later releases"

Products

• VMware SDDC Manager

Issue/Introduction

• VCF upgrade from 4.x to 5.x.
  You select Plan upgrade for VCF, and the versions are grayed out.

• At some circumstances all versions are grayed out, otherwise there maybe a specific version that you need to upgrade which is grayed out.
• This message appears  - "VMware Cloud Foundation 4.x is a stepping stone release that Workload domains must upgrade to prior to upgrading to later releases"

Environment

VMware Could Foundation 4.x

Cause

SDDC has a workload domain that is not upgraded fully. In other words, one of the component in the VCF stack is not meeting the required BOM version. 

For example, all the domains are on version 4.5.2.0, and there is one VI domain that displays an older version 4.4.0.0.

Domain 1 -

Domain 2 - 

In this case Domain 1, was still reflecting 4.4.0.0 as the ESXi hosts were running an older version, which confirms an incomplete upgrade of the VI Domain. 

Resolution

Upgrade the components on the VI domain to meet the BOM version required for the complete upgrade of the VCF stack - Correlating VMware Cloud Foundation version with the versions of its constituent products.

NOTE: To identify which component is not meeting the required BOM version, run the SOS utility to validate the versions. 

/opt/vmware/sddc-support/sos --version-health --DOMAIN-NAME <input_domain_name>

 

Additional Information

In this case, the VI domain displayed version 4.4.0.0 since the ESXi hosts were running on version  7.0.3-19193900, that is older than the required BOM version 7.0.3-21930508. However the host was actually upgraded with a version higher than the required BOM, but the SDDC manager contains the older version.

^{|     |        Component/Entity FQDN    |      BOM Version          |   Component Version  | VCF Inventory version | YELLOW |}               

^{| 182 |        ESXI: esxi01.fqdn        |       7.0.3-21930508      |    7.0.3-24784741    |     7.0.3-19193900    | YELLOW |
| 183 |        ESXI: esxi02.fqdn        |       7.0.3-21930508      |    7.0.3-24784741    |     7.0.3-19193900    | YELLOW |
| 184 |        ESXI: esxi03.fqdn        |       7.0.3-21930508      |    7.0.3-24784741    |     7.0.3-19193900    | YELLOW |
| 185 |        ESXI: esxi04.fqdn        |       7.0.3-21930508      |    7.0.3-24784741    |     7.0.3-19193900    | YELLOW |}