© 2014 VMware Inc. All rights reserved. VMware vSphere Upgrade Tips and Tricks Patrick Kremer – Systems Engineer, VMware Twitter: URL for this deck will be provided at the end of the presentation

Upgrade Planning

CHECK YOUR HARDWARE COMPATIBLITY!!!!!!!!!! 3 Seriously. Check it. VMware Compatibility List:

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CHECK YOUR GUEST OS COMPATIBLITY!!!!!!!!!! 5 Check it twice. Customers run into problems when they don’t discover that the guest OS is no longer supported until an outage. Finding out that your production SQL guest is unsupported during an outage:

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Prepare your upgrade sequence 7 We’ve got a list for that VMware supported upgrade sequence: There are 29 VMware products on the list. vCenter Server is 12 th ! ESXi is 24 th ! If you upgrade out of sequence:

2x 1.5x 3x 2x 4x Platform Features - Increased vSphere Maximums 8 Up to 4X Scale Improvement with vSphere 6

vCenter Server Features - Enhanced Capabilities 9 MetricWindowsAppliance Hosts per VC1,000 Powered-On VMs per VC10,000 Hosts per Cluster64 VMs per Cluster8,000 Linked Mode ✔✔ Scalability supported by both Windows Install and vCenter Server appliance. Windows install supports Postgres and External SQL and Oracle DBs. vCSA supports embedded Postgres and external Oracle DBs. vCSA converter Fling: to-vcva-converter to-vcva-converter

vCenter Server 6.0 – Platform Services Controller Platform Services Controller takes it beyond just Single Sign-On. It groups: Single Sign-On (SSO) Licensing Certificate Authority Two Deployment Models: Embedded vCenter Server and Platform Services Controller in one virtual machine - Recommended for small deployments where there is less then two SSO integrated solutions External vCenter Server and Platform Services Controller in their own virtual machines - Recommended for most deployments where there are two or more SSO integrated solutions 10 Platform Services Controller PSC vCenter

Provisions each ESXi host, each vCenter Server and vCenter Server service with certificates that are signed by VMCA New vCenter Server solutions for complete certificate lifecycle management: vCenter Server Certificate Lifecycle Management for vCenter and ESXi 11  While you can decide not to use VMCA in your certificate chain, you must use VECS to store all certificates, and keys for vCenter Server and services.  All ESXi certificates are stored locally on the host. VMware Endpoint Certificate Service (VECS) VMware Certificate Authority (VMCA) Stores all certificates and private keys for vCenter Server and vCenter Server services Managing VECS is done via vecs-cli

Platform Services Controller (PSC) 12 Internal or External? PSC migration: Sean Whitney, Senior Technical Support Engineer with VMware External was designed to eliminate the dependency on vCenter. Other VMware software products rely on SSO for their authentication. If you currently use other VMware offerings, or think you might in the future, consider external. There is currently no supported way to move from a 6.0 embedded PSC to a 6.0 external PSC. Support is being worked on but there is no official release date.

vCenter Server Clients 13 Client Comparison Use caseWeb ClientvSphere Client vSphere management ✔✔ ESXi/VM patching (VUM) ✖✔ Hardware version 8-11 ✔✔*✔* New features ✔✖ * v10-11 Read only access

vCenter Server vSphere Web Client Usability Improvements – Can get anywhere in one click – Right click menu has been flattened – Recent tasks are back at the bottom – Dockable UI 14

Read the vCenter Deployment Guide 15 To upgrade to vCenter 6.0, you must be running vCenter 5.0 or later. Consider making PSC a subordinate CA

Read the vCenter High Availability Blog entry 16 You can use FT to protect vCenter Cluster the backend database Cluster vCenter with Windows Server Failover Clustering (introduced in vCenter 5.5U3) A few points pulled from the blog post:

Upgrading ESXi 17 Old School Boot directly from ISO and manually execute the upgrade. If you’re doing this on more than 1 host:

Upgrading ESXi 18 Update Manager Works very well for most upgrades You can import vendor custom ISOs (i.e. HP and Dell ISOs) with all the required custom drivers Create a baseline with your custom ISO and attach it to a cluster. Full Update Manager upgrade documentation for vSphere 6 here.here 6 minute VMware-authored video on the whole process here.here

Upgrading ESXi 19 Update Manager

Upgrading ESXi 20 Update Manager

Upgrading ESXi 21 Update Manager

Upgrading ESXi 22 Update Manager

Upgrading/Installing ESXi 23 Scripted

Upgrading/Installing ESXi 24 Scripted

Upgrading/Installing ESXi 25 Scripted

Upgrading/Installing ESXi 26 Scripted – William Lam’s virtuallyGhetto.com PXE Boot install Custom Boot Menu Install

Upgrading/Installing ESXi 27 Scripted – William Lam’s virtuallyGhetto.com Semi-Interactive Maintain a single copy of the kickstart config that is not host-specific, then key in the specific parameters on boot.

Questions? Patrick Kremer Systems Engineer Twitter: This deck is available at

© 2014 VMware Inc. All rights reserved. vSphere 6 Certification Changes Patrick Kremer – Systems Engineer, VMware URL for this deck will be provided at the end of the presentation

Version 6 Certification Roadmap 30 VMware Technical Certifications

Version 6 Certification Roadmap 31 VCA Exams – Online exams proctored by Pearson Vue.

Version 6 Certification Roadmap 32 vSphere 6 Foundations exam

Version 6 Certification Roadmap 33 vSphere 6 Foundations exam – Required base certification for all new VCP candidates

Version 6 Certification Roadmap 34 VCP6-DCV – Migration for existing VCP holders

Version 6 Certification Roadmap 35 VCAPs are now VCIXs There will still be 2 exams – an administration and a design exam, but you have to pass both to achieve the VCIX certification.