Upgrade Commander

This topic provides information to upgrade a previous version of Commander to the currently supported version.

If you need help with the upgrade process, contact Customer Support.

Before you begin the upgrade process

  • Review Supported upgrade paths to see whether a direct upgrade from your currently installed version is supported.
  • Review Changes affecting upgrading users to understand any Commander user interface and operational changes that the newer release may introduce for users.
  • Process any in-flight service requests before upgrading.
  • Back up Commander and its database before upgrading. See the Snow Globe article Microsoft SQL Maintenance Planning for Snow Commander.
    • We recommend performing the upgrade during a maintenance window, as Commander will be unavailable during the upgrade process. Depending on the database size and content, the upgrade process may take a significant amount of time.
    • You can only upgrade from a database of the same type. If you want to change from the default to SQL server or vice versa, you must uninstall and reinstall Commander, in which case all your system and user data is overwritten.
  • If you use the VM Access Proxy (formerly the Console Proxy), it's highly recommended that you upgrade to the latest VM Access Proxy 3.7. See Upgrade Commander VM Access Proxy for more general information about upgrading the VM Proxy and to ensure that you perform the steps for both upgrade tasks in the proper order.
  • If you added one or more Kubernetes clusters as cloud accounts in version 7.0.1, remove them prior to upgrade. You can safely re-add them after upgrade.
  • If you added plug-in workflow steps to a 7.0.1 vCommander installation, you must remove them prior to upgrade. After upgrade, download the latest plug-in workflow steps from https://github.com/Embotics/Plug-in-Workflow-Steps. These plug-in steps are compatible with vCommander release 7.0.2 or higher. Then, install the new plug-in step packages.
  • If you were managing Azure Classic (also known as Azure Service Manager), we recommend removing the cloud account before upgrade. If you don't remove the cloud account before upgrade, it will be removed as part of the upgrade, along with any deployment destinations targeting it. Azure Classic is no longer supported as a cloud platform.

Supported upgrade paths

  • You cannot upgrade directly to Commander 9.3.0 or later from versions earlier than 8.9.0.
  • As of release 9.0.0, support will be removed for Commander versions earlier than 8.5.0.

Consult the following table to see whether a direct upgrade from your currently installed version is supported:

Current installed versionDirect upgrade supported to

9.3.x

9.4.x

9.2.x

9.3.0, 9.4.x

9.1.x

9.2.x, 9.3.0, 9.4.x

9.0.x

9.1.x, 9.2.x, 9.3.0, 9.4.x

8.10.x

9.0.x, 9.1.x, 9.2.x, 9.3.0, 9.4.x

8.9.x

8.10.x, 9.0.x, 9.1.x, 9.2.x, 9.3.0, 9.4.x

8.8.x

8.9.x, 8.10.x, 9.0.x, 9.1.x, 9.2.x

8.7.x

8.8.x, 8.9.x, 8.10.x, 9.0.x, 9.1.x, 9.2.x

8.6.x

8.7.x, 8.8.x, 8.9.x, 8.10.x, 9.0.x, 9.1.x, 9.2.x

8.5.x

8.6.x, 8.7.x, 8.8.x, 8.9.x, 8.10.x, 9.0.x, 9.1.x, 9.2.x

8.4.x

not supported

8.3.x

not supported

8.2.x

not supported

8.1.x

not supported

8.0.x

not supported

7.5.x

not supported

7.1.x

not supported

7.0.x

not supported

Billing Data Reset (from version 7.5.x to 8.0.x)

    Upon upgrade to 8.0.x, all your existing AWS and GCP costing data will be reset to be able to determine the charge type for each record. Azure costing data will also be reset, but all charges will be listed as Resource Usage.

    For AWS and Azure, this data reset may take some time, depending on the amount of billing data you have. You can't use Costing features such as Cost Analytics and Costing Reports during billing data reset.

    For AWS, Commander will do the following:

    1. Check how many days of billing records exist (find the oldest date of billing data).
    2. Delete all the existing AWS billing records.
    3. Try to reset all the data from the S3 bucket (as far back as the oldest date of data that existed before the upgrade). If there’s a purge policy on the S3 bucket, there's a chance that not all the deleted data in Commander can be reset.

    If the reset task fails, you may still be able to retrieve your costing data manually using a system property (embotics.billing.retrieval.windowsize) to set the number of days worth of billing data to fetch. If you have a nightly scheduled billing retrieval task, be sure to retrieve the data manually before your nightly scheduled task runs. After you've retrieved the data, return the system property back to the previous setting.

    If you need help with manual billing retrieval, contact Customer Support.

Changes affecting upgrading users

Important Upgrade Information:

Commander 9.0.0 has updated our database SQL driver. This driver has new configuration requirements which may result in issues during upgrades. If you're using the default SQL instance and port, no upgrade issues are expected. Please read the following Knowledge Base article if you're using a SQL named instance or a non-standard port. Upgrading to Commander 9.0 using SQL named instances or non-standard ports. For help with the configuration, create a case through the Snow Support Portal.

This change was made in version 9.3:

For improved security, the tomcat web server now prioritizes a hardened cipher configuration whenever possible. This enhancement is applied to new installations of Commander 9.3.0 and later; upgrading users must manually switch to the hardened configuration. For more information, see Enabling Hardened Security in Commander 9.3.0 and Later.

This change was made in version 9.3:

Several billing enhancements were introduced in Commander 9.3. To apply these enhancements after upgrading, you must reset billing records for all private clouds using the earliest start date. Once the billing records have been reset, retrieve historical data for your private cloud accounts. It is recommended you do all of this during a system maintenance period. For more information on retrieving historical data, see Retrieve Historical Data for vCenter Cloud Accounts, Retrieve AWS Billing Data, and Retrieve Azure Billing Data.

This change was made in version 8.8:

Change requests are now configured and managed in Commander separately from new service requests. Separating change requests and new service requests provides a clearer management approach and better reflects the importance and utility of change requests.

Change requests are now located on a separate Change Request tab that's accessed from the Configuration > Self-Service menu. The Forms tab, where change requests were previously managed, now only provides access to new service request forms. For more information, see Create Change Requests.

This change was made in version 8.5:

We replaced the Reserved Instance Planner report with the Reserved Instance Recommendations report. Reserved Instance Recommendations will be enabled by default in version 8.5 and the new report will accrue costs. If you had a scheduled task to email the Reserved Instance Planner report to you, that task will be removed in 8.5, so you'll no longer receive Reserved Instance Planner report emails. You can configure the Reserved Instance Recommendations report to send emails. For more information, see mana Generate and Schedule Reports.

This change was made in version 8.5:

Immediately after upgrading to version 8.5, a task will run in the background to migrate billing data. You can see this "Upgrade Billing Records" task in the Commander Task tab at the bottom of the console. During this brief data migration period of under an hour, billing retrieval will be delayed, and data in the cost and Service Portal dashboards won't be accurate. After billing data migration is complete, all billing tasks, such as the Cost Analytics Dashboard and billing reports, will return to full functionality.

Performing the upgrade

To upgrade from a previous version:

  1. Back up the Commander database.
  2. To keep a copy of your configuration, record the values of any system properties that you customized for your current Commander installation.

    Commander system properties have the format "-Dembotics.<setting>=<value>" and are used to tweak Commander default settings.

  3. Log in to Snow Commander Support Downloads and download the Commander installation package.
  4. Double-click the installation executable.
  5. In the Installation wizard, click Next.
  6. Accept the terms of the license agreement and click Next.
  7. Review the customer experience information and click Next.
  8. Select Upgrade to the new version (system and user data will be preserved) and click Next.
  9. Review the upgrade-related warnings, enable Continue Upgrade to confirm the upgrade, and click Next.
  10. Review the Pre-installation Summary and click Install.
  11. Follow the wizard and, if required, edit any of the fields that appear in the displayed pages and click Next.

    For more information, see the Installation Table.

  12. Click Done when you're finished.
  13. After the upgrade is completed, the Commander Windows service restarts. Once the service is started, it typically takes about five minutes before the application is fully initialized and available for use.
  14. Launch Commander at https://<server hostname or IP address> using your browser and the credentials you normally use.

    If you specified a non-default Commander port, the URL to access Commander is
    https://<server hostname or IP address>:<port>.

    After upgrading, always clear your browser cache to ensure that drop-down menus, directory trees and images display properly.

    A Database Maintenance scheduled task is scheduled to run once on the Saturday following the upgrade, at 2:00 a.m. This task creates database indexes which speed up cloud account reconnection and Commander service restart. Once the scheduled task has run successfully, the task is automatically deleted. It's not possible to delete this task manually. You can change the time when this scheduled task runs. See Schedule Database Maintenance Task.