VMware

We are on the home stretch of our Automating your vSphere Upgrade blog series. The final step of completing our upgrade will be upgrading our Virtual Distributed Switch (VDS). When upgrading your VDS on vSphere 6.7 the version is actually 6.6 (we will cover the details later). Please make sure prior to upgrading your VDS to 6.6 all ESXi hosts have been upgraded to ESXi 6.7, if you still have hosts on ESXi 6.5 you will only be able to upgrade to version 6.5.

Next up in our Automating your vSphere Upgrade blog series is your VMFS Datastore. vSphere 6.5 and vSphere 6.7 both support the latest VMFS-6. Once all of your ESXi hosts that are connected to the VMFS-5 datastore have been upgraded to vSphere 6.5 or vSphere 6.7 you can then proceed to migrate your datastore to VMFS-6.

Next up in our Automating your vSphere Upgrade blog series is your VMware Tools and VM Compatibility. Upgrading these both have different requirements so we will cover when and how you should upgrade your VMware Tools and VM compatibility in the below post.

The first topic we will cover in our Automating your vSphere Upgrade series is updating our core infrastructure. Upgrading Platform Services Controller(PSC)  and vCenter Server via the CLI installer. In our workshops one of the common things I hear is that most folks aren’t using the CLI based tools that have been included in the installer. I am a huge fan of these as they make migrations and upgrades seamless–especially when having to perform the task if you have multiple PSC’s and vCenter Servers. Using the CLI tools don’t have to be intimidating, as we go through this blog we will cover some how-to’s and benefits of using the CLI based approach.

On Tuesday August 14th, Intel Released their news on the latest vulnerability <strong>L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF) or ForeShadow</strong>. In response to this VMware released vSphere patches to address the issues. Since then I have seen quite a few threads come up and thought i would address them from a patching perspective.

This will be my first VMworld attending as an employee and quite a bit of things will be going on. Just in case anyone was interesting in vSphere Upgrades I wanted to share out some key sessions that I recommend including my own.

On May 22nd we released the first update to our vCenter Server 6.7 version, 6.7a. I will let you know how you can patch your 6.7 GA vCenter Server to 6.7a.

It’s finally out! vSphere 6.7 is the next major release of VMware’s virtualization software. I’ve been using 6.7 through the vSphere Beta Program and testing even newer features in my current role. I am here to talk to you about planning your vSphere upgrade and some planning and considerations you should have when going to the latest release. The first, thing I would like to mention is there is no supported migration from vSphere 5.

Another lovely Friday starting off with strange issues, when taking a host out of standard maintenance we noticed that HA would not reconfigure, and kept saying The object ‘vim.Datastore:datastore-1131’ has already been deleted or has not been completely created. This was strange because no other hosts had this issue. I proceeded to follow standard troubleshooting steps, reconfigure HA…same issue….disable HA for entire cluster and re-enable…..same issue…whoops thats not good! First step, check what luns are available to the cluster.

So it seems to be that time of year again with new projects coming around. This time its all about vRA. This is probably my first of many blogs to come about things I have come across. My question today was how do I pre-create a computer AD account, join a device to the domain and then clean it up when the machine is destroyed. Turns out this is super simple in vRealize Automation 7.