I've been doing upgrades to various environments over the past few months and all has gone well, but I'm curious about something. Until now, I have never used the cell maintenance message because it wasn't really very descriptive and I didn't see any real benefit in using it. The past few times I have tried giving it a shot and it does it's job but I'm curious if anyone else seems a little confused about how it is documented.
VMware KB: Upgrading to VMware vCloud Director 5.5.x best practices
If you walk through the upgrade documentation above the first thing that the documentation mentions is the cell maintenance message. It links you to the specific information about how to execute the cell maintenance message here. The documentation wants you to stop the cell services and then turn on the maintenance message, which is just a few easy commands. The issue comes in with the next step because you need to quiesce the cell using the cell-management-tool. My understanding is that in order for the cell-management-tool to work the cell has to be running. Since we have stopped the cell services in the first step we will get the following error:
Unable to connect to cell: Failed to retrieve RMIServer stub: javax.naming.ServiceUnavailableException [Root exception is java.rmi.ConnectException: Connection refused to host: A.B.C.D; nested exception is:
java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused]
The first time I saw this I was a little worried, but then I realized what was going on and reboot/restarted the cell services and moved on by simply quiescing the cells and essentially skipping the first step about displaying a maintenance message. Does this seem counter intuitive to anyone else or am I missing something?