Category: vCSA

Have you upgraded your vCenter Server Appliance from vSphere 5.1 to vSphere 5.5 yet?

It’s been well over a year since I’ve been here (well, closer to 18 months, really).  I’ll apologize for that now 🙂

The reality, though, is that it’s been a long, exhausting, and rewarding year and a half, and I’ve taken on some different responsibilities at work.  That’s taken up quite a bit of my time.  I decided I just needed to roll some of that time together with this blog.  Well, at least some of the fruits of that work.

We’ve just released the latest, greatest version of vSphere – vSphere 5.5  With a new version comes a need to upgrade.

Some of you may be using the vCenter Server Appliance.  There’s an Update feature in the appliance to help update from one version to another.  But right next to that in the management UI is a tab called Upgrade.  And that’s the process I’ve just stepped through for you.  Keep in mind here that I haven’t read any of the upgrade KBs (shame on me), but this is a relatively intuitive process, I think.  

Take a look at the video – it’s about 20 minutes long – some time has been shaved off; the entire process took me about an hour, but you don’t want to watch a bunch of silence and spinning wheels, do you?  I didn’t think so.

I will throw out a caveat (that I didn’t show onscreen) that I did have to regenerate the self-signed certificates before the Web Client worked properly.  

Test this process extensively before you try this in a production environment!! Please, don’t try this blindly!

I learned quite a bit during this process, and I hope it helps you a bit.

Up and coming

So, I really do work stuff, along with all the tinkering lately.  That’s the problem with new gadgets!

I’ve been gearing up on the vSphere 5 courses from VMware, and I gotta say, you should take these.  Even if it’s just the 2-day What’s New course for you VMware gurus.  What’s New is the condensed “look at all the cool new stuff” class that gets you some hands on time with the new knobs and dials as well as gets you some good discussion time.  The new Install, Configure, Manage class is no slouch, but we’re gently massaging it to work better for most that will likely be taking it.

Add to that the fact that I’m working on a post (more back-burner) about my take on why customers should think about the cloud.  And I’m tossing around a post about automation, and why.  Not so much how, but why.

On the front burner, however, I’m in the process of working through the new Auto Deploy feature of vSphere 5, specifically the integration of Auto Deploy and its related components into the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA).  Everything’s baked in, so I’m doing a “what to edit and how to make it work” post.  I’m having just a touch of difficulty I think due to the wacky nature of my lab (should be taken care of soon enough, I hope), but the framework is there.

Oh, and add to that my DSL modem gave up the ghost.  I’d say it let out all its magic smoke (you know, the magic smoke that all electronics run on – when the smoke escapes, the electronics don’t work anymore!), but there was no puff of smoke.  It just stopped.  I looked up and there were no lights.  No biggie, I’ve got a U-Verse installation scheduled already to replace the DSL with a fatter pipe, and my cable modem is still the primary pipe.  It just means that my next class won’t have any network redundancy if something goes wrong.

So that’s what’s going on.  Blog breaking, DSL dying, vCSA tinkering fun.  Stay tuned for more goodness!