In this blog post, I am going to walk through how to upgrade both your Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Management and Workload clusters. I’ll cover the Tanzu CLI options, as well as how you can leverage the features of Tanzu Mission Control for upgrades as well.
For my example use cases, I’ll be upgrading from TKG 1.4.2 to 1.5.4. Although the process should be similar for other upgrade paths, I do recommend you consult the official documentation before attempting any upgrade in case there are any changes.
Caution: VMware recommends not installing or upgrading to Tanzu Kubernetes Grid v1.5.0-v1.5.3, due to a bug in the versions of etcd in the versions of Kubernetes used by Tanzu Kubernetes Grid v1.5.0-v1.5.3. Tanzu Kubernetes Grid v1.5.4 resolves this problem by incorporating a fixed version of etcd. For more information, see Resolved Issues in the TKG v1.5 Release Notes.
Pre-requisites
To upgrade Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG), you download and install the new version of the Tanzu CLI on the machine that you use as the bootstrap machine. You must also download and install base image templates and VMs, depending on whether you are upgrading clusters that you previously deployed to vSphere, Amazon EC2, or Azure.
Download the Tanzu CLI and Kubernetes OVAs
On the VMware Customer Portal download both the Tanzu CLI and OVA files as necessary.
I’ve highlighted in the below screenshot; your Management Cluster will always need to run the latest Kubernetes version.
