Now, I know what you’re thinking…

And, no. Not that Architect. Welcome to another installment in my continuing series of home lab adventures with @PernixData. Today’s installment will cover the upgrade of FVP from 3.0 to 3.1, and the activation of the Architect 30-day Trial. First off, what is Architect? According to PernixData, Architect is:

“PernixData Architect™ is a revolutionary software platform for holistic data center design, deployment, operations and optimization. It combines a best-in-class user experience with robust real-time analytics and design recommendations to deliver unprecedented visibility and control of virtualized applications and the underlying storage infrastructure.”

Now, is this something that I really need in my home lab to live? No. Do I want to look at all the shiny buttons and dashboards? You bet I do. So, let’s get this party started.

First and foremost, this is extremely similar to my first post, on the original install. Just adding a few more steps. This guide assumes you have already downloaded the new management server package, and downloaded the new VIB. You can use VUM to stage and add the VIB, but I am still doing this by hand, for the sake of being cool. I have the Management server package on my FVP server, and the .zip of the VIB uploaded to my shared storage.

Let’s run the management server upgrade. The very first thing we see is a prompt asking if we are sure if we want to upgrade. Am I sure? Yes.

Clicking Yes gives us a quick InstallShield prompt where it is loading up the .msi files needed to run the installer.

Now, we’re in business. Let’s begin the seemingly-endless stream of clicking Next.

Once we start the upgrade, we’ll need to accept the license agreement. Not sure what it says. Let’s accept anyways.

The installer then advises which products are included in this installer. FVP and Architect are both included. It also advises that after the installation, a 30 day trial of each can be setup. I am already licensed for FVP Freedom, so the trial of Architect is really the only thing I am after.

Once we finish with that, we’re ready to start the upgrade process.

It ran all the way through the process, then dumped me out to a prompt telling me I need to kill the FVP Management Server. I told it to automatically close, and attempt to restart the installer.

Went all the way through the installer again. This time, it’s all good. We’re done! Well, not done, but no more Management server installer.

Now we need to do the VIB’s. Since we already have the 3.0 VIB’s on the box, we need to copy the uninstall script to /tmp and then run the script.

It took a couple minutes to run that script. Once it was done, I ran the VIB list command to verify that there was no PernixData VIB’s. Looks like we’re good.

Now, we’ll simply run the VIB install command, pointing to the new VIB’s that i hosted on the shared storage. Rinse and repeat for every host in the cluster.

Now we’re ready to get things running. Launch the Management Server from a browser, and login as you did before. You should get the same Hub that you did before.

We now need to verify licensing. Click the Licensing tab. When you go to the FVP tab, your existing licensing should be there. Mine was. Now I’ll go to the Architect tab, and click Start Trial.

The screen updated, and I can now see that I am licensed for FVP and Trial-Licensed for Architect! Everything went as according to plan!

Time to see what happens. Hold on to your butts…

And we have… Architect!

The 30-day Trial countdown is on. Architect blogs to come!

-vTimD

Note: My series on PernixData software is in no way sponsored by PernixData. The posts are all written by me, for knowledge, not compensation.