Planning VMware Upgrades
System upgrades are a fact of life in the world of IT. As systems grow more complex and interrelated, upgrades become more and more difficult to plan, as each of those interacting systems creates a dependency that may or may not support the new version! In the VMware world, there's a couple of great tools that I use every time one of my customers asks for help with an upgrade project... so I figured that I'd write about them here! If the customer wants to upgrade their ESXi servers (which they almost always do), the first thing that I check is the VMware Compatibility guide . When I'm using this tool, I typically select the new ESXi version under Product Release Version and then just use the search bar to find the hardware platform that the customer is using. After selecting the right server, the page will show us what firmware versions on that server platform are supported (or other interesting notes to be aware of). These days, it's pretty rare for a server plat