Recommended Stemcell Strategy When Installing/Upgrading Tanzu Operations Manager and TAS (Elastic Application Runtime)

Products

• VMware Tanzu Platform Core

Issue/Introduction

When planning a foundation upgrade, confusion often arises regarding the correct stemcell version to deploy. A common question is whether to use the exact stemcell version documented in the release notes—which is included by default when installing Operations Manager—or to use the newest version available on the Support Portal.

Environment

Tanzu Platform

Cause

The discrepancy stems from Operations Manager shipping with a specific, pre-bundled stemcell to bootstrap the BOSH Director. The release notes list this bundled version in the components table. However, this bundled stemcell serves as a static snapshot from the day the Operations Manager release is built. Because stemcell updates publish rapidly to patch critical operating system and kernel vulnerabilities, the bundled version becomes outdated quickly.

Resolution

Always download and apply the latest available patch version for the major stemcell line required by the deployment. Do not rely solely on the bootstrap version bundled with Operations Manager.

Additional Information

The Tanzu Upgrade Planner displays tile requirements using a wildcard format, such as 1.8-1.* (Ubuntu Jammy).

• The 1.8 specifies the minimum required version.

• The 1.* indicates that any newer patch version within the 1.x line is fully supported.

This wildcard explicitly confirms that floating forward to the latest available patch release is the supported and expected behavior.