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This chapter focuses on many of the basic concepts and benefits of virtualization. It provides a quick overview of VMware virtualization, introduces the virtual datacenter architect, and lays some of the groundwork necessary to create and implement a successful virtual datacenter design using VMware vSphere 6.x.
We will also explore the VMware Certified Advanced Professional-Datacenter Virtualization (VCAP6-DCV) design exam and the new VMware Certified Implementation Expert-Datacenter Virtualization (VCIX6-DCV) certification, including a few tips that should help you prepare to successfully complete the exam and certification.
Then, we will look at some of the new features of vSphere 6. This section will include where to find the current release notes and the latest vSphere product documentation.
Finally, we will take a high-level look at the process of planning an upgrade to an existing vSphere deployment to vSphere 6.
If you are already familiar with virtualization, this chapter will provide a review of many of the benefits and technologies of virtualization.
Since the focus of this book is on design, we will not go into great detail discussing the specifics of how to configure resources in a virtual datacenter. Most of you probably already have a good understanding of VMware's virtualization architecture. So, this section will provide just a basic overview of the key VMware components that are the building blocks to the virtual datacenter.
Virtualization creates a layer of abstraction between the physical hardware and the virtual machines that run on it. Virtual hardware is presented to the virtual machine, granting access to the underlying physical hardware, which is scheduled by the hypervisor's kernel. The hypervisor separates the physical hardware from the virtual machine, as shown in the following diagram:
The hypervisor separates the physical hardware from the virtual machine
The new release of vSphere 6 does not change the design process or the design methodologies. The new functions and features of the release provide an architect with more tools to satisfy design requirements.
At the core of any virtualization platform is the hypervisor. The VMware hypervisor is named vSphere ESXi, simply referred to as ESXi. ESXi is a Type 1 or bare-metal hypervisor. This means it runs directly on the host's hardware to present virtual hardware to the virtual machines. In turn, the hypervisor schedules access to the physical hardware of the hosts.
ESXi allows multiple virtual machines with a variety of operating systems to run simultaneously, sharing the resources of the underlying physical hardware. Access to physical resources, such as memory, CPU, storage, and network, used by the virtual machines is managed by the scheduler or the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) provided by ESXi. The resources presented to the virtual machines can be overcommitted. This means more resources than are available can be allocated to the virtual machines on the physical hardware. Advanced memory sharing and reclamation techniques, such as Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) and ballooning, along with CPU scheduling, allow for overcommitment of these resources, resulting in greater virtual to physical consolidation ratios.
ESXi 6 is a 64-bit hypervisor that must be run on a 64-bit hardware. An ESXi 6 installation requires at least 1 GB of disk space for installation. It can be installed on a hard disk locally, on a USB device, on a Logical Unit Number (LUN), on a Storage Area Network (SAN), or can be deployed stateless on hosts with no storage using Auto Deploy. The small footprint of an ESXi installation provides a reduction in the management overhead associated with patching and security hardening.
With the release of vSphere 5.0, VMware retired the ESX hypervisor. ESX had a separate Linux-based service console for the management interface of the hypervisor. Management functions were provided by agents running in the service console. The service console has since been removed from ESXi, and agents now run directly on ESXi's VMkernel.
To manage a standalone host running ESXi, a Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) is provided for basic configuration and troubleshooting. A shell is available that can either be accessed locally from the console or remotely using Secure
Shell (SSH). esxcli and other commands can be used in the shell to provide advanced configuration options.
An ESXi host can also be accessed directly using the vSphere client. The ESXi DCUI is shown in the following screenshot:
ESXi's DCUI
A virtual machine is a software computer that runs a guest operating system. Virtual machines comprise a set of configuration files and data files stored on local or remote storage. These configuration files contain information about the virtual hardware presented to the virtual machine. This virtual hardware includes the CPU, RAM, disk controllers, removable devices, and so on. It emulates the same functionality as the physical hardware. The following screenshot depicts the virtual machine files that are stored on a shared Network File System (NFS) data store:
Virtual machine files stored on a shared NFS data store displayed using the vSphere web client
The files that make up a virtual machine are typically stored in a directory set aside for the particular virtual machine they represent. These files include the configuration file, virtual disk files, NVRAM file, and virtual machine log files.
The following table lists the common virtual machine file extensions along with a description of each:
|
File extension |
Description |
|---|---|
|
|
This is a virtual machine configuration file. It contains the configurations of the virtual hardware that is presented to the virtual machine. |
|
|
This is a virtual disk descriptor file. It contains a header and other information pertaining to the virtual disk. |
|
|
This is a preallocated virtual disk. It contains the content or data on the disk used by the virtual machine. |
|
|
This is a file that stores the state of a virtual machine's Basic Input Output System (BIOS) or Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) configurations. |
|
|
This is a virtual machine swap file. It gets created when a virtual machine is powered on. The size of this file is equal to the amount of memory allocated minus any memory reservations. |
|
|
This is a virtual machine logfile. |
|
|
This is a virtual machine file used with snapshots to store data about each snapshot active on a virtual machine. |
|
|
This is a virtual machine snapshot data file. |
Virtual machines can be deployed using a variety of methods as follows:
Using the New Virtual Machine wizard in the vSphere client or vSphere web client
By getting converted from a physical machine using the VMware converter
By getting imported from an Open Virtualization Format (OVF) or Open Virtualization Archive (OVA)
By getting cloned from an existing virtual machine
By getting deployed from a virtual machine template
When a new virtual machine is created, a guest operating system can be installed on the virtual machine. VMware vSphere 6 supports more than 80 different guest operating systems. These include many versions of the Windows server and desktop operating systems, many distributions and versions of Linux and Unix operating systems, and Apple Mac OS operating systems.
Virtual appliances are preconfigured virtual machines that can be imported to the virtual environment. A virtual appliance can comprise a single virtual machine or a group of virtual machines with all the components required to support an application. The virtual machines in a virtual appliance are preloaded with guest operating systems, and the applications they run are normally preconfigured and optimized to run in a virtual environment.
Since virtual machines are just a collection of files on a disk, they become portable. Virtual machines can be easily moved from one location to another by simply moving or copying the associated files. Using VMware vSphere features such as vMotion, Enhanced vMotion, or Storage vMotion, virtual machines can be migrated from host to host or data store to data store while they are running. Virtual machines can also be exported to an OVF or OVA to be imported into another VMware vSphere environment.
VMware vCenter Server provides a centralized management interface to manage and configure groups of ESXi hosts in the virtualized datacenter. The vCenter Server is required to configure and control many advanced features, such as the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), Storage DRS, and VMware High Availability (HA). The vCenter Server is accessed using either the Windows vSphere client or the vSphere web client. Many vendors provide plugins that can be installed to allow third-party storage, network, and compute resources to be managed using the vSphere client or vSphere web client.
Tip
The C#, or Windows vSphere client, is still available in vSphere 6. Since the release of vSphere 5.5, access to, and the configuration of, new features is only available using the vSphere web client. The vSphere web client can be accessed at https://FQDN_or_IP_of_vCenter_Server:9443/.
The vCenter Server can be installed on a 64-bit Windows server. It can be run on dedicated physical hardware or as a virtual machine. When the vCenter Server is deployed on the Windows server, it requires either the embedded vPostgres database, a Microsoft SQL database, or an Oracle database to store configuration and performance information. IBM DB2 databases are supported with vSphere 5.1, but this support was removed in vSphere 5.5.
With the release of vCenter 6, the Microsoft SQL Express database is no longer used as the embedded database. vPostgres is now used as the embedded database for small deployments. The vPostgres database on a Windows server can be used to support environments of fewer than 20 hosts and 200 virtual machines. When upgrading to vCenter 6, if the previous version was using the Microsoft SQL Express database, the database will be converted to the embedded vPostgres database as part of the upgrade.
Another option to deploy the vCenter Server is the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). The VCSA is a preconfigured, Linux-based virtual machine, preinstalled with the vCenter Server components. The appliance includes an embedded vPostgres database that supports up to 1,000 hosts and 10,000 virtual machines. The embedded vPostgres database is suitable for almost all deployments, using an external Oracle database is also supported.
Several other management and automation tools are available to aid the day-to-day administration of a vSphere environment. One of them is the vSphere Command-Line Interface (vCLI). Another one is the vSphere PowerCLI, which provides a Windows PowerShell interface. The vRealize Orchestrator can be used to automate tasks, and the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) is a Linux-based virtual appliance that is used to run management and automation scripts against hosts. These tools allow an administrator to use command-line utilities to manage hosts from remote workstations.
VMware provides a suite of other products that benefits the virtualized datacenter. These datacenter products, such as VMware vRealize Operations (vROps), VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), and VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), can each be leveraged in the virtual datacenter to meet specific requirements related to management, disaster recovery, and cloud services. At the core of these products is vSphere suite, which includes ESXi, the vCenter Server, and the core supporting components.
The following table provides a matrix of some of the core VMware technologies and the benefits that can be realized using them. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all VMware technologies and features, but it provides an insight into many of the technologies commonly deployed in the enterprise virtual datacenter:
|
VMware technology |
Primary benefits |
Description |
|---|---|---|
|
vSphere ESXi |
Server consolidation Resource efficiency |
ESXi is VMware's bare-metal hypervisor that hosts virtual machines, also known as guests, and schedules virtual hardware access to physical resources. |
|
vSphere HA |
Increased availability |
HA restarts virtual machines in the event of a host failure. It also monitors and restarts the virtual machines in the event of a guest operating system failure. |
|
vMotion and vSphere DRS |
Resource efficiency Increased availability |
vMotion allows virtual machines to be live-migrated between hosts in a virtual datacenter. DRS determines the initial placement of the virtual machine on the host resources within a cluster and makes recommendations, or automatically migrates the virtual machines to balance resources across all hosts in a cluster. |
|
Resource pools |
Resource efficiency |
These are used to guarantee, reserve, or limit the virtual machine's CPU, memory, and disk resources. |
|
VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) |
Increased availability |
FT provides 100 percent uptime for a virtual machine in the event of a host hardware failure. It creates a secondary virtual machine that mirrors all the operations of the primary. In the event of a hardware failure, the secondary virtual machine becomes the primary and a new secondary is created. |
|
Thin provisioning |
Resource efficiency |
This allows for storage to be overprovisioned by presenting the configured space to a virtual machine but only consuming the space on the disk that the guest actually requires. |
|
Hot add CPU and memory |
Resource efficiency Scalability |
This allows for the addition of CPU and memory resources to a virtual machine while the virtual machine is running. |
|
Storage vMotion |
Resource efficiency |
This moves virtual machine configuration files and disks between storage locations that have been presented to a host. |
|
vSphere Data Protection (VDP) |
Disaster recovery |
This provides agentless image-level backup and recovery of virtual machines. |
|
vSphere Replication |
Disaster recovery |
This features provides the ability to replicate virtual machines between sites. |
|
vCenter Server |
Simplified management |
This provides a single management interface to configure and monitor the resources available to virtual datacenters. |
|
vCenter Server Linked Mode |
Simplified management |
This links multiple vCenter Servers together to allow them to be managed from a single client. |
|
Host Profiles |
Simplified management |
This maintains consistent configuration and configuration compliance across all the hosts in the environment. |
There are many others, and each technology or feature may also have its own set of requirements that must be met in order to be implemented. The purpose here is to show how features or technologies can be mapped to benefits, which can then be mapped to requirements and ultimately mapped into a design. This is helpful in ensuring that the benefits and technologies provided by virtualization satisfy the design requirements.
Not all applications or server workloads are good candidates for virtualization. It is important that these workloads are identified early on in the design process.
There are a number of reasons a server or application may not be suitable for virtualization. Some of these include the following:
Vendor support
Licensing issues
Specialized hardware dependencies
High resource demand
Lack of knowledge or skill set
A common reason to not virtualize an application or workload is the reluctance of a vendor to support their application in a virtual environment. As virtualization has become more common in the enterprise datacenter, this has become uncommon. However, there are still application vendors that will not support their products once virtualized.
Software and operating systems licensing in a virtual environment can also be a challenge, especially when it comes to conversions from physical server to virtual machine. Many physical servers are purchased with Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) licenses, and these licenses, in most cases, cannot be transferred to a virtual environment. Also, many licenses are tied to hardware-specific information, such as interface MAC addresses or drive signatures. Licensing issues can usually be overcome. Many times, the primary risk becomes the cost of upgrading or acquiring new licensing. As with other potential design risks, it is important that any issues and the potential impact of licensing on the design be identified early on in the design process.
Some applications may require the use of specialized hardware. Fax boards, serial ports, and security dongles are common examples. There are ways to provide solutions for many of these. However, often, with the risks associated with the ability to support the application or with the loss of one or more of the potential benefits of virtualizing the application, the better solution may be to leave the application on dedicated physical hardware. Again, it is important that these types of applications be identified very early on in the design process.
Physical servers configured with a large amount of CPU and memory resources where applications are consuming a large amount of these resources may not be good candidates for virtualization. This also holds true for applications with high network utilization and large storage I/O requirements. vSphere 6.0 supports virtual machines configured with up to 128 Virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 4 TB of memory, but the high utilization of these configured resources can have a negative impact on other workloads in the virtual environment. These high-utilization workloads will also require more resources to be reserved for failover. The benefits of virtualizing resource-intensive applications must be weighed against the impact placed on the environment. In some cases, it may be better to leave these applications on dedicated physical hardware.
Many administrators may lack knowledge of the benefits or skills to manage a virtualized datacenter. The administrator of a virtual environment must be well-versed with storage, networking, and virtualization in order to successfully configure, maintain, and monitor a virtual environment. Though this may not necessarily be a reason not to leverage the benefits of a virtualized environment, it can be a substantial risk to the acceptance of a design and its implementation. This is especially true with smaller IT departments where the roles of the server, application, storage, and network administrators are combined.
Each of these can introduce risks in the design. We will discuss how risk impacts the design process in much more detail in Chapter 2, The Discovery Process, and Chapter 3, The Design Factors.
The virtual datacenter architect, or simply the architect, is someone who identifies requirements, designs a virtualization solution to meet those requirements, and then oversees the implementation of the solution. Sounds easy enough, right?
The primary role of the architect is to provide solutions that meet customer requirements. At times, this can be difficult since the architect may not always be part of the complete sales process. Many times, customers may purchase hardware from other vendors and look to us to help them "make it all work". In such situations, the purchased hardware becomes a constraint on the design. Identifying and dealing with constraints and other design factors will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 2, The DiscoveryProcess, and Chapter 3, The Design Factors.
The architect must also be able to identify requirements, both business and technical, by conducting stakeholder interviews and analyzing current configurations. Once the requirements have been identified, the architect must then map the requirements into a solution by creating a design. This design is then presented to the stakeholders and if approved, it is implemented. During the implementation phase, the architect ensures that configurations are done to meet the design requirements, and the work done stays within the scope of the design.
The architect must also understand best practice. Not just best practice to configure the hypervisor, but for management, storage, security, and networking. Understanding best practice is the key. The architect not only knows best practice but understands why it is considered best practice. It is also important to understand when to deviate from what is considered best practice.
The large part of an architect's work is "customer-facing". This includes conducting interviews with stakeholders to identify requirements and ultimately presenting the design to decision makers. Besides creating a solid solution to match the customer's requirements, it is important that the architect gains and maintains the trust of the project stakeholders. A professional appearance and, more importantly, a professional attitude are both helpful in building this relationship.
The virtual datacenter architect must be able to take a holistic approach to datacenter design. This means that, for every decision made, the architect must understand how the environment, as a whole, will be impacted.
An architect is required to be, at the very least, familiar with all aspects of the datacenter. They must understand how the different components of a datacenter, such as storage, networking, computing, security, and management, are interconnected, as shown in the following diagram:
The holistic approach to datacenter design
It has become very important to understand how any decision or change will impact the rest of the design. Identifying dependencies becomes an important part of the design process. If a change is made to the network, how are computing, management, and storage resources affected? What other dependencies will this introduce in the design? Failing to take a holistic approach to design can result in unnecessary complications during the design process and potentially costly fixes after the design is implemented.
You have been engaged to design a virtualization solution for a financial organization. The solution you are proposing is using 10 GB Converged Network Adapters (CNA) to provide connectivity to the organization's network in three 1U rackmount servers. The organization needs to separate a Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) that is currently configured to be delivered over the CNA onto a physically separate network to satisfy a new compliance requirement. A 1 GB network will provide sufficient bandwidth for this network, and the network should be highly available. Single points of failure should be minimized.
To support this compliance requirement, you, the architect, must take a holistic approach to the design by answering a number of questions about each design decision. Some questions are as follows:
Are there available network ports in the current rackmount servers, or will a network card need to be added? If a card must be added, are there available Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) slots?
Will a dual port network card provide sufficient redundancy, or will the network need to be separated across physical cards? Are there onboard network ports available that can be used with a PCI network card to provide in-box redundancy?
Has the physically separate switch's hardware been obtained? If not, how long before the equipment is received and deployed? Will this have an impact on the implementation schedule?
How will the virtual switch need to be configured to provide the connectivity and redundancy required?
The impact can be fairly significant, depending on some of the answers. For example, let's say that the 1U rackmount server will not support the required network adapters needed to satisfy the requirement, and a different 2U rackmount server must be used. This then raises more questions, such as: "Is there sufficient space in the rackmount to support the new server footprint?"
What if the requirement had been that the applications connected to this network be virtualized on separate physical server hardware and storage? What parts of the design would have to change? The architect must be able to understand the dependencies of each part of the design and how a change in one place may affect other areas of the design.
As you think through these questions, you should be able to see how a change to a requirement can have a deep impact on many other areas of the design. It becomes very important to identify requirements early on in the design process.
For vSphere 5 and vSphere 6, VMware released advanced exams, testing the ability of a person to deploy, administer, and design complex virtual environments. The exams for vSphere 6 are the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6-Datacenter Virtualization Deployment (VCAP6-DCV Deployment) exam, which focuses on deploying and administering a VMware vSphere environment, and the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6-Datacenter Virtualization Design (VCAP6-DCV Design) exam, which focuses on designing an enterprise VMware vSphere environment. VMware has introduced a new certification, VMware Certified Implementation Expert-Datacenter Virtualization (VCIX6-DCV), which is obtained by passing both the VCAP6-DCV Deployment and VCAP6-DCV Design.
The current VMware Certification path is mapped out in the following flowchart:
VMware certification path for datacenter administrators and architects
The VCAP6-DCV Design exam tests your ability to design enterprise virtualized environments. To be successful, you must have an in-depth understanding of VMware's core components and the relationship they share with other components of the datacenter, such as storage, networking, and application services, along with a mastery of VMware's datacenter design methodologies and principles. All the exam objectives, including study resources, can be found in the exam blueprint. VMware exam roadmaps and the VCAP exam blueprints can be found on the VMware Certification portal page at https://mylearn.vmware.com/portals/certification/.
The final stop on the VMware certification path is the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX). The VCDX certification requires you to create a VMware vSphere design, submitting the design to VMware for review, and then defending the design before a panel of VMware Design Experts.
Before you are eligible to take the VCAP6-DCV Design exam, you should have obtained the VMware Certified Professional 6–Data Center Virtualization (VCP6-DCV) certification. Besides the training required for the VCP6-DCV certification, there is no other required training that must be completed in order to sit for the VCAP6-DCV Design exam. When you are ready to schedule your VCAP6-DCV Design exam, you must submit an exam authorization request to VMware. When you submit the exam authorization request, VMware will verify that you have met the certification prerequisites and provide you with the access necessary to schedule the exam.
At the time of writing this book, the VCAP6-DCV Design exam is in beta, and the final version has not yet been released. The VCAP6-DCV Design beta exam consists of 31 questions with a time limit of 240 minutes. The scoring of the exam has yet to be determined. The beta exam questions are comprised of a mixture of multiple-choice, drag-and-drop, and design scenarios. The final release of the VCAP6-DCV Design exam will likely be very similar. For details, refer to the VMware Certification portal at https://mylearn.vmware.com/portals/certification/.
The VCAP-DCD exam for vSphere 5 was one of the most challenging exams I have ever taken. Here are a few tips to help you prepare for and successfully sit the VCAP-DCD or VCAP6-DCV Design exam:
Study the material on the exam blueprint: The exam blueprint lists all the objectives of the exam, along with links to documentation related to each exam objective.
Review the vSphere 6 release notes and product documentation: The release notes and product documentation will provide an overview of the features available, the requirements that must be met to support implementation of the new features, and the best practices to implement features to support design requirements.
Schedule your exam: Scheduling your exam sets a goal date for you to work towards. Setting the date can provide motivation to help you stay on track with your studying efforts.
Watch the APAC vBrownBag DCD5 series: The APAC vBrownBag did a series of podcasts focusing on the VCAP-DCD exam for vSphere 5 exam objectives. Even though these podcasts focus on version 5 of the exam, many of the design methodologies and concepts are similar. These podcast are still relevant and provide a valuable study resource. The podcast can be found at http://www.professionalvmware.com/brownbags.
Get familiar with the exam design interface: On VMware's VCAP Certification page for the DCD exam, there is a UI Demo that will help you get familiar with the design interface that is used in the exam.
Practice time management: It is very important that you are aware of the amount of time you are taking on a question and how much time remains. If you get hung up on a multiple-choice question, take your best guess and move on. Conserve time for the more complex drag-and-drop and design scenario questions.
Answer every question: A question left unanswered will be marked incorrect and will not benefit your score in any way. A guess has some chance of being correct.
Study the material on the exam blueprint: I know this has already been mentioned once, but it is worth mentioning again. The exam blueprint contains all the testable objectives. Study it!
For up-to-date information on the VCAP6-DCV Design certification, to download the exam blueprint, and to book the exam once it has been released, visit the VMware Certification portal page at https://mylearn.vmware.com/portals/certification/.
vSphere 6 is the latest release of VMware's virtual datacenter platform. This release includes features that provide increased scalability, enhanced security, increased availability, and simplified management of the virtual datacenter infrastructure. A few of the new features and enhancements include:
New vCenter Architecture to simplify deployment and management of authentication and SSL certificates
Cluster scalability increased to 64 hosts and 8,000 VMs
Fault Tolerance (FT) enhancements to support virtual machines with up to four vCPUs
Virtual Volumes (VVOL) providing object-based policy managed virtual machine aware storage
NFS v4.1 support for NFS authentication and multipath support
vMotion enhanced to support migrations across vCenter Servers and over distances of up to 100 ms RTT
Content library centralized storage and management of virtual machine templates, ISO, and scripts
Network IO Control version 3 provides the ability to reserve bandwidth to a single virtual machine or an entire virtual port group
These are just a few of the new features and enhancements introduced with the release of vSphere 6. A new version of vSphere with the new features and enhancements does not directly change the design process or methodology. The enhancements and features provide an architect with more tools and options to meet requirements, but can also introduce complexity into the design.
It is important for the architect to understand all the new features and enhancements available. This is a simple but important process, which includes:
Accessing the vSphere 6.0 release notes at https://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere6/doc/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-60-release-notes.html
Accessing the vSphere 6 documentation sets found at https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-6-pubs.html
Reading the vSphere 6 release notes gives the architect a summary of the additional features, bug fixes, and known issues. There is also information on the upgrade process and workarounds for known issues.
Reviewing the vSphere documentation, including the vSphere Installation and Setup Guide, vSphere Upgrade Guide, and vSphere Virtual Machine Administration Guide, gives the architect a deeper understanding of new features and how to implement new functionality. The documentation also provides specific requirements that must be satisfied in order to enable a new feature or function. These documentation sets are available online or can be downloaded in the .pdf, .epub, or .mobi formats.
In the VMware Communities, https://communities.vmware.com/, there are forums available to discuss topics such as vSphere Upgrade & Install at https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vsphere/upgradecenter and ESXi 6 located at https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vsphere/esxi6, along with other Communities dedicated to each vSphere product. In these forums, an architect or administrator can find real-world issues encountered by other vSphere administrators and architects. Questions and discussions can be posted related to features and issues related to all vSphere products. If you run into issues or have questions about a specific feature, there are people in the community who are always happy to help.
Upgrading an existing vSphere environment to vSphere 6 is a fairly simple process and can be completed with minimal impact to production with the proper planning.
In this recipe, we will look at the steps required to properly plan an upgrade to vSphere 6. We will not cover the specifics of upgrading vCenter Server, ESXi hosts, or any other component of the virtual datacenter. Specific recipes for upgrading vCenter Server and ESXi hosts have been included in Chapter 4, vSphere Management Design, and recipes for upgrading virtual machine to the latest hardware are included in Chapter 9, Virtual Machine Design.
The following tasks should be completed when planning a vSphere 6 upgrade:
Verify that the existing hardware is on the VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) at https://www.vmware.com/go/hcl
Check for interoperability between VMware products using the VMware Product Interoperability Matrix at http://partnerweb.vmware.com/comp_guide2/sim/interop_matrix.php
Determine interoperability and support between VMware vSphere 6 and third-party hardware and software products
Determine the proper upgrade path and sequence
Completing these steps to properly plan a vSphere 6 upgrade will ensure that the upgrade can be completed successfully.
With each release of vSphere, VMware adds support for new hardware and firmware for devices such as disk controllers, server platforms, network interface cards (NIC), and so on. VMware also removes support for older hardware and firmware. It is important to verify that the hardware is on the supported compatibility list prior to attempting an upgrade. Using the VMware Hardware Compatibility List is covered in more detail in Chapter 8, vSphere Physical Design. Failure to validate support for hardware on HCL can cause significant issues after the upgrade. Unsupported hardware may not be available for use or may cause instability in the environment. Replacing unsupported hardware or upgrading firmware on current hardware to a supported configuration may be required as part of the upgrade process.
Checking for interoperability between vSphere products will help ensure that there is minimal impact on functionality during and after the upgrade process. Just like the hardware and firmware, the interoperability between vSphere products changes with each version. New support is added for newer products and features, while support may be removed for older, products and features. Details on using the VMware Product Interoperability can be found in Chapter 4, vSphere Management Design.
The virtual datacenter may contain many third-party products that integrate with the vSphere environment. These products often include backup and recovery software, replication software, and management and monitoring applications. Before upgrading to vSphere 6, check with each third-party product vendor to validate support for vSphere 6 or to determine the requirements for vSphere 6 support. This is the step I see missed most often, typically due to not fully understanding dependencies with these products. It is critical to understand what products require integration with the vSphere environment and the impact that changes to the environment may have on these products. Again, this is where proper planning from the beginning ensures a successful vSphere 6 upgrade.
The final step is to determine the proper upgrade path. If validation of support and interoperability has been completed correctly, this step will likely be the easiest in the process. Once the hardware is validated and, VMware product and third-party product interoperability has been validated, a plan can be formulated for upgrading.
Details are important when it comes to the support of hardware and software in the virtual datacenter. Spending time to properly plan will ensure a successful upgrade to vSphere 6.
