Upgrading VMM with configured AlwaysOn Availability Groups

If your VMM is configured with AlwaysOn AGs, you need to remove the VMM database from AG before upgrading the VMM. For doing this, open SQL Server Management Studio, connect to the server and expand AlwaysOn High Availability, select VirtualManagerDB under Availability Databases, right-click, and then choose Remove Database from Availability Group...:

Initiate a failover to the SQL Server on which the VMM database is installed:

Then, start VMM 2016 installation using the steps described in the previous sections. After successfully upgrading, you will need to configure AlwaysOn AG by adding the VMM database back to the availability group:

Because the VMM updates SQL security logins only on a primary SQL server, you are required to add the same account after upgrading for every secondary node in the cluster. As you can see in the following figure, this account is identical to the VMM service account; it's not available on the secondary node by default and is mapped to the VMM database as a user with membership to the db_owner. Use the same settings while adding the account to the other nodes in the cluster:

When the account is configured on every secondary node, initiate failover to verify that you can restart the VMM Service on the node different from the primary node. If you are not experiencing any issues after failover and doing a highly available VMM upgrade, you can continue the VMM installation on other VMM nodes.