Monthly Archives: April 2018

vSphere upgrade blog post header

Upgrading VMware vSphere 5.5 to vSphere 6.5 (VMUG Presentation)

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Blog post born from a VMUG Presentation

Mid Feb, one of the London VMUG leaders posted on twitter, looking for someone to present on the subject of “upgrading from vSphere 5.5 to vSphere 6.5”.

So I jumped at the chance, kind of, and offered to present. This blog post covers the content from that presentation.

  • vSphere 5.5 – End of Support
  • vSphere 6.5 – New features
  • OK, so let’s just upgrade then?
  • The plugin’s
  • SSO is gone!
  • Understand your topologies
  • Pre-Upgrade Tasks
  • The Upgrade, the big event
  • Gotcha’s
  • VSAN Considerations
  • vShield Manager is no more! Upgrade to NSX Manager
  • Resources

The presentation is available to download here – http://vexpert.me/London-vmug-dean (case sensitive link)

Dean Lewis London VMUG

Or I’ve figured out how to embed it from Slideshare.net below (But animations don’t seem to work);

vSphere 5.5 – End of Support
  • End of General Support for vSphere 5.5 is September 19, 2018
    • Includes vCenter 5.5, ESXi 5.5, VSAN 5.5
    • KB 51491
  • In the event you are unable to upgrade before the End of General Support (EOGS) and are active on Support and Subscription, you have the option to purchase extended support in one year increments for up to two years beyond the EOGS date.
    • Expect this to be more costly than general support.
    • SLA’s are more akin to that of basic support rather than production support
    • Annual security patch. Includes catastrophic/critical security fixes only
    • Ability to create hot patches for Severity 1 issues only
  • Technical Guidance for vSphere 5.5 is available until September 19, 2020 primarily through the self-help portal.
  • During the Technical Guidance phase, VMware does not offer new hardware support, server/client/guest OS updates, new security patches or bug fixes unless otherwise noted.
    • For example, there was no SPECTRE/Meltdown security patches released for vSphere 5.1

It’s not only the core vSphere 5.5 products that are affected, as we can see from the End-of-Support tracking page provided by virten.net. There are other VMware solutions that you have deployed that may also need upgrading.

vSphere 5.5 products end of support Continue reading Upgrading VMware vSphere 5.5 to vSphere 6.5 (VMUG Presentation) →