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 ...

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...