Virtually Jason

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 ...

I recently worked with a customer to upgrade their Horizon VDI environment's Windows vCenter 5.5 server to the vCenter Server Appliance running 6.5.  I knew from an earlier experience that such a migration could potentially be challenging, but I hoped that things would go more smoothly this time, since that old issue was from before the Migrate  option was introduced.  This customer also had a smaller, completely isolated DR VDI environment that we could upgrade first, to prove out our process.  So, that's what we did! The migration of the DR environment went without a hitch.  We even spun up about 20 desktops and had a few IT staff log into and use them during the upgrade, so that we could be confident that we'd identify any issues that might impact the users during the production migration.  Everything went great, so we confidently moved forward with the production migration.  You can probably guess what happened next. Fortunately, we didn't run ...

Many of my customers request help when preparing for an upgrade to the latest version of vSphere (recently, they've been wanting to upgrade vCenter to 6.5 on the vCenter Server Appliance, but this is generally a recurring request for each new version).  And I get it, there's a lot of moving parts to consider when planning on an upgrade like this.  So, I figured that I'd do a quick write-up about the process that I go through when planning for an upgrade like this. The first thing that I do is compile a big list of all of the solutions in the environment that are dependent on vCenter and ESXi.  I just build a big spreadsheet with 4 columns: Solution, Current Version, Desired Version, and Notes.  When collecting this list, it's important to consider other VMware solutions (such as vRealize Automation Center, Horizon, Network Insight, etc.), hardware platform (is this running on HP BL460c blades?  Nutanix?  IBM?), backup solutions (Avamar is very common amon...

Towards the start of the year, I made a post about my vCenter to vCenter migration process , which can be used to update from vCenter 5.5 to vCenter 6 (or for that matter, to downgrade, or whatever).  Since then, I've done a lot of these migrations and the scripts/procedure have matured.   Jeff and I have fixed many bugs, but the reason that I'm posting about this (again) is that I recently added a new feature and have polished our migration process. The latest versions of the migration scripts (the ones that get the settings from the source vCenter and then recreate those settings on the destination vCenter) now support DRS Rules!  The native support for DRS Rule manipulation through PowerCLI is a bit lacking... but fortunately, the community has solved that problem!   Matt Boren and Luc Dekens have created a module called DRSRule that is built to help with the reading and manipulation of DRS Rules (pretty self explanatory, right?).  I took advantage of t...

One of my customers was upgrading their Unidesk environment to 2.6 and we ran into a problem.  It proved to be an incredibly specific problem and not at all tied to Unidesk (just tied to the way they push this particular upgrade), but the troubleshooting process was very interesting and so I think it's worth putting this knowledge out there. As part of the upgrade, the Unidesk Management Appliance needs to install an OVF of itself (which is an uncommon but not unprecedented behavior for virtual appliances).  That is the step that was failing.  The most common source of that failure is a firewall; if port 443 is blocked between the Management Appliance and the ESXi host, that deployment will fail.  We went round and round with the network team, checking firewalls and couldn’t find any records of ports being blocked, but we couldn’t communicate with the ESXi hosts (although we could communicate with the vCenter server just fine). Eventually, we did a TCPDump ...