vSphere 6.0 will be end of life/general support on 12th
March 2020 which is just under two months away and most people would of started or completed their journey to upgrade to vSphere 6.5 or 6.7. I have provided some of the high level steps/consideration that I have taken when I was doing my planning.
As vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 both have an end of life date of 15th November 2021 I decided to look at both version for my upgrade plan with the mind of moving to 6.7 as my first choice. The reason I looked at both was in case there was issues with hardware or software that was not supported on a particular version. Throughout my planning I also put into consideration whether it is better to do fresh installs of vCenter/ESXi or an upgrade as a fresh install might be easier. For a small environment with not much integration it might be easier to just do a fresh install but that is my opinion and you would need to weight up what is better for you.
First thing first is to make sure your current server model/hardware, more specifically the CPU works on
vSphere 6.5 and/or 6.7 as if it doesn’t work on the version that you want to move to then you need to quickly get funding for new kit or move to the version that is supported for now. Hardware Compatibility Guide
Once you got the all clear that the server model/CPU hardware is good and compatible to the version you are looking to upgrade to then you need check the hardware vendor
to ensure that your local hardware components like array controllers, network card etc are compatible as you may need to replace them or upgrade the firmware on them.
As the virtual infrastructure is built
with other hardware components such as network switches and storage arrays you would
want to check with those vendors to make sure that you don’t need to do any upgrades or replacements to those as well. For example Pure Storage has information here to tell you some of the best practice settings you should apply. and I usually raise a support case with them to double check. As vSphere 6.5/6.7
has been out for a while now most vendor would have published best practice
guides to help you on how to configure their products to work with VMware nicely together.
We talked about the hardware but the next step is to look at
some of the third party software (backup, monitoring, plugins etc) that you might have integrated with
VMware to see if your current version is compatible with vSphere 6.5/6.7. Again you might need to do upgrades or purchase a new version if you don't have a valid support agreement. You don’t want to do an upgrade and then afterwards
realise you can’t do any VM backups or have caveats with the backup method which breaks your SLA.
Next step is to check if there are any other VMware product/s that you are currently using that will come to end of life at the same time as vSphere 6.0. Lifecycle matrix
- vCenter Server 6.0
- vCenter Update Manager 6.0
- ESXi 6.0
- Site Recovery Manager 6.0
and 6.1
- vSAN 6.0, 6.1 and 6.2
- vSphere Data Protection 6.0 and
6.1
- vSphere Replication 6.0 and
6.1
As you can see from the example there are some big red cross for some version. For example if you was on 6.0 U3 and you wanted to go to 6.5.o then it is a big no no. If you hover across the box you will see an information box pop up explaining the reason.
If you have other products above then also use the tool to
check against them too.
On the same web page there is a "Solution/Database interoperability" tab which you might need if you decide that you don't want to use VMware Postgres database with the appliance. On the tab select "VMware vCenter Server" as the solution and then the version of vCenter you are looking to move to and see which database version is supported.
On the same page the first tab "interoperability" lets you compare two solutions to make sure that the upgraded version will work with the other VMware solution that you have running
As you can see I have selected vCenter 6.5 U3 and 6.7 U3 and my solution was SRM. You can see that with vSphere 6.5 U3 I can run SRM version 6 and 8 but for vSphere 6.7 U3 I can only run version 8.1.2 and 8.2.
If you have more that one VMware product that you need to upgrade as part of this project then you would need to check the update sequence to ensure that you are upgrading them in the right order. VMware has
produced a nice chart to help you see which order you would need to update in if you use more than one VMware product. vSphere 6.5 KB 2147289 vSphere 6.7 KB53710
By now you would roughly know what you need to do as part of the process to upgrade from vSphere 6.0 to 6.5 or 6.7. A step sometimes I forget to do it is to check if I actually have capacity to deploy these products. For example you may require
addition storage, network bandwidth, compute if you was doing a vCenter side by
side upgrade so make sure you reserve some for this upgrade.
VMware
has stated that they have deprecated the architecture of having an external
Platform Service Controller and moving to embedded to simplify the architecture.
So if you haven't fully started to use VMware appliance then this is a good
time to move to fully using just the appliance. The next major version of
vSphere won’t have a windows option which was announced back in August 2017 Bye Bye Windows
The following article KB60229 provides you with workarounds and supported methods of Platform Service Controller. The article also has links to upgrade guide to 6.5/6.7 which covers pretty much all possibly scenario of platform service controller architecture that you might have now and what options you have when you upgrade to 6.5 or 6.7. Its a bit of a read but do spend time on it.
Next step is to plan what testing you want to carry out after your upgrades;
- backup and restore process of vCenter
- Powershell scripts that you might normally run
- vCenter alerts ensuring they do fire out
- host failure to check that HA works
- Move VMs between host to ensure vMotion works and especailly different ESXi versions
These are just some of the examples and your list could be much longer
So these are the steps I have taken to help me plan my upgrade which in the end was 6.7. I have listed some of the resources I used along the journey of mine which I hope will have some use for you. Good luck
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