vBrownbag Session – Upgrading from vSphere 5.5 to 6.x

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VMworld 2018, I was lucky enough to get my name down on the list to present on the vBrownbag stage, a community driven source of brilliant knowledge articles, videos, and web meetings, for the community by the community. Read more about vBrownbag here

In the below session I took on the session that had proved to be a hit at VMUGs around the UK. “Upgrading from vSphere 5.5 to 6.x”

This session focuses less on the “how to upgrade the components themselves” but more what you need to cover for planning and preparation, considerations during the upgrades, and calling out known gotchas.

Since the above video, I’ve since joined VMware, and presented the official slide deck covering this subject at the UK VMUG Usercon with Kev Johnson, Technical Marketing Engineer – vSphere Lifecycle.

You can find the official free e-book that accompanies the VMware presentations here;

Regards

Dean


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vBrownBag Session – Microsoft Azure for vSphere Admins

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At VMworld 2018 I was invited to speak on the vBrownbag platform, which is a great community focused and run resource. Below is my session “Microsoft Azure for vSphere Admins”

You can find the presentation here – http://vexpert.me/azure

Regards

Dean


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Yet another “I’ve got a new job” blog post

General,

So I think I seen someone say on Twitter its silly season as we enter the winter period with people announcing they are moving jobs etc. And given the number of tweets about new jobs and blog posts, I think they are correct.

Well I won’t drag this out.

I’m joining VMware as a Technical Account Manager in December working across the UK. Over the past few years my focus or rather enjoyment of my roles, has been around the customer and building strategies with them. So this role fits in nicely especially for a company whose products I’ve tried my best to specialise in for the past few years.

Thanks to all those who have helped me in my journey or simply just said “don’t worry, you’ll smash the interview”.

Onwards and upwards.

Image Source

 

Regards

Dean


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This blog has been rebranded

General

Hi All,

So after owning the vEducate.co.uk domain for a while, I’ve finally got around to re-branding the blog and even produced a basic logo.

I’ll retain educationalcentre.co.uk and redirect to the new domain, so that anyone who crops up on my older links can still find me!

I will probably write-up a post soon detailing the process of changing the domain name and what broke 😀 Thanks to those who helped me get it up and running yesterday.

 

Regards

Dean


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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)

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.

Continue reading Upgrading VMware vSphere 5.5 to vSphere 6.5 (VMUG Presentation) →

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