VSphere - Looking For A Consultant To Help With Upgrade

[JonThompson]

Hello,

 

Can anyone recommend any consultants that specialise in VSphere?

 

We've got VSPhere 5.0 upgrade 2 installed and would like help with upgrading this over the summer.

 

Midlands/Leicester based a bonus, but wouldn't preclude anyone else.

 

Thanks!

Edited May 17, 2016 by JonThompson

[FN-GM]

Is it just software updates or hardware updates as well?

[JonThompson]

Is it just software updates or hardware updates as well?

 

Software only. Our hardware was purchased as part of BSF, so is only two years old.

[MicrodigitUK]

http://www.cuttergrp.com is who we use.

[Tefters]

What help are you after exactly in terms of upgrading?

Are you able to perform any actions yourself as it's extremely easy to upgrade 5 to either 5.5 or 6.

 

Let me know what sort of cluster(2,3,4 node, Veeam backup, vcenter Windows VM etc...) you have and I can easily provide an easy guide to follow.

 

If it's going to save you money that could be spent on equipment for students (pc's etc...) I'd be more than happy to help remotely.

Edited May 18, 2016 by Tefters

[seustice]

Happy to provide a recommendation, PM me.

[JonThompson]

What help are you after exactly in terms of upgrading?

Are you able to perform any actions yourself as it's extremely easy to upgrade 5 to either 5.5 or 6.

 

Let me know what sort of cluster(2,3,4 node, Veeam backup, vcenter Windows VM etc...) you have and I can easily provide an easy guide to follow.

 

If it's going to save you money that could be spent on equipment for students (pc's etc...) I'd be more than happy to help remotely.

 

We have full access rights. The main problem is, is that neither I our the NM are familiar with VM upgrades as we've never done it before. I've sort of worked out how to check for definition updates (which there are a few), but we are reluctant to try it ourselves without some support incase we break it. Ideally we'd like someone to show us how to do it, and then I'm sure I could then do the future upgrades myself, as I've been learning it as I go, apart from the update part.

 

We've got 3 ESXi hosts, with two HP lefthand SANS hosting our windows servers and a couple of Linux boxes. We've also got to update the SANS as when it was installed by Capita they didn't update it, and they also put the FOM on the SANS so that's another job!

 

If you've got a guide that explains what to do that would be great thanks. Thanks for the offer of remote help. I'll pass this on to my NM, and get back to you.

 

Thanks for your help.

[JonThompson]

Happy to provide a recommendation, PM me.

 

PM sent.

[Davit2005]

I've done ours twice now, it's not for the faint hearted like me but there was a 200 odd page VMWare guide to help.

 

The process is similar to patching hosts, I've found their is a recovery mode which enabled me to go back to ESXi5.1 when the firmware did not want to play ball with the newer version.

 

If you have the VM's on Shared storage as us it will make it a bit easier because when the host is put into Maintenance mode it will jus vMotion the VM's accross to other hosts meaning their should not be any disruption to the production environment. I do patches on the hosts during normal hours without any issue.

 

First upgrade was 4.1 to 5.1 about 2 years ago.

 

And recently 5.1 to 6.0 , but this occasion I setup a new vCenter because didn't want any SSO issues. I jus copied the Cluster settings and Rules to the new vCenter.

 

 

This is what I done this time:

1. Setup new 6.0 vCenter including the Update Manager.

2. Create a baseline using an imported ESXi image (we have HP so I used the HP custom ESXi image), there are other customized images such as Lenovo, Fujitsu etc which should contain the correct drivers for the hardware.

3. Attach the Baseline to the host

4. Scan the host

5. Remediate the host, this is when the VM's will vMotion accross, the host will go into maitenance and then apply the upgrade.

 

After the reboot the host should go back to the fuctioning state omce again and happy days.

[JonThompson]

I've done ours twice now, it's not for the faint hearted like me but there was a 200 odd page VMWare guide to help.

 

The process is similar to patching hosts, I've found their is a recovery mode which enabled me to go back to ESXi5.1 when the firmware did not want to play ball with the newer version.

 

If you have the VM's on Shared storage as us it will make it a bit easier because when the host is put into Maintenance mode it will jus vMotion the VM's accross to other hosts meaning their should not be any disruption to the production environment. I do patches on the hosts during normal hours without any issue.

 

First upgrade was 4.1 to 5.1 about 2 years ago.

 

And recently 5.1 to 6.0 , but this occasion I setup a new vCenter because didn't want any SSO issues. I jus copied the Cluster settings and Rules to the new vCenter.

 

 

This is what I done this time:

1. Setup new 6.0 vCenter including the Update Manager.

2. Create a baseline using an imported ESXi image (we have HP so I used the HP custom ESXi image), there are other customized images such as Lenovo, Fujitsu etc which should contain the correct drivers for the hardware.

3. Attach the Baseline to the host

4. Scan the host

5. Remediate the host, this is when the VM's will vMotion accross, the host will go into maitenance and then apply the upgrade.

 

After the reboot the host should go back to the fuctioning state omce again and happy days.

 

Thanks. Do you have a copy of the guide?

[aguacate]

Can you tell us what version you are currently running and whether you can migrate vm from a host to the remaining two, an upgrade from version 4 to 5 is much more intricate than upgrading from 5.1 to 5.5, can you also let us know what version of vcenter server you have and whether this is virtualized or sitting on a physical box.

 

Thx

[Davit2005]

Thanks. Do you have a copy of the guide?

 

If you search for the Guide through Google you can download direct.

 

There is a best practice here https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2109772

 

When I upgraded to ESXi5.1 the guide didn't really go into the creation of the Baseline that well if at all but this new guide hopefully will do a better job. I jus found a guide on creating a baseline via YouTube in the end.

 

TBH I didn't even follow the guide this time :-$

 

Check out pages 118 for supported upgrade to ESXi 6.0

 

Hopefully this will give you an indication of what needs to be done.

 

If your vCenter is Physical I'd consider making it Virtual.

 

Once I built the new vCenter it was simply a matter of migrating the Hosts accross from the old vCenter. One spanner in the works was Veeam because it was refering to the old vCenter via IP address.

Edited May 18, 2016 by Davit2005

[Tefters]

Ignore the VMware documentation, its fluffy and way too long. Great if your like me and want to know every intricate detail but you don't need to for the upgrade.

 

You've got a 3 host cluster with shared SAN storage so Vmotion makes this process p*ss easy, only question I need an answer for is if your vCenter server is a VM (which i presume it will be) and is it the Appliance or a Windows server?

Also what software do you use to backup your VM's, Veeam is the best answer i'm looking for here...

 

Here's a great example guide of how easy it is to upgrade vCenter on a Windows VM - https://www.virtuallyboring.com/upgrading-windows-based-vcenter-5-x-to-6/ (hitting the next button is hard work).

Upgrading the hosts involves the ESX 6 iso, rufus and a 8GB usb stick.

VUM is not worth using on a 3 host setup.

Edited May 18, 2016 by Tefters

[Davit2005]

We have 22 hosts here so VUM is defo worth it, it certainly makes patching/upgrading of hosts a lot easier to do, it jus handles it all.

 

Plus if your servers are in a cold noisy server room the less time spent in there the better.

Edited May 18, 2016 by Davit2005

[Tefters]

We have 22 hosts here so VUM is defo worth it.

 

Plus if your servers are in a cold noisy server room the less time spent in there the better.

 

Defo agree with you there with that size cluster, I usually go with 5+ hosts to warrant VUM.

ILO is a god send in that example Did someones the other week for them to save them £1,500 in consultancy fee's all via ILO and TV, all they had to do was whack in the USB stick into the hosts.

[Davit2005]

Defo agree with you there with that size cluster, I usually go with 5+ hosts to warrant VUM.

ILO is a god send in that example Did someones the other week for them to save them £1,500 in consultancy fee's all via ILO and TV, all they had to do was whack in the USB stick into the hosts.

 

Yep iLO to build new hosts and really handy to see what the host is doing during the upgrade process if need be.

[JonThompson]

Can you tell us what version you are currently running and whether you can migrate vm from a host to the remaining two, an upgrade from version 4 to 5 is much more intricate than upgrading from 5.1 to 5.5, can you also let us know what version of vcenter server you have and whether this is virtualized or sitting on a physical box.

 

Thx

 

Yes we can manually migrate the hosts across to other hosts, which I have done before when I put the ESXi hosts into maintenance mode to sort out the ILO password. We have a Physical Windows server that runs the VSphere and acts as the management server for it. We don't backup the raw VM's, we use MS DPM which backs up the system state etc. which we can restore from, but we would have to create a VM first.

 

Thanks for the link, I've been looking for answers online, but could never find anything that wasn't written in VM geek! I'm assuming that I can go from 5.0 straight to 6.0.X? I thought I'd read somewhere that you had to go 5.0.x to 5.1 to 5.5 to 6?

[aguacate]

Ok, I would question why you want to upgrade to version 6?, bringing your hosts to version 5.5 is relatively painless with update manager, but i would get more comfortable with your vmware environment before version 6, at each stage you will need to upgrade vcenter server before the host upgrade, I'm assuming that you have an active contract with vmware?

[Tefters]

Yes we can manually migrate the hosts across to other hosts, which I have done before when I put the ESXi hosts into maintenance mode to sort out the ILO password. We have a Physical Windows server that runs the VSphere and acts as the management server for it. We don't backup the raw VM's, we use MS DPM which backs up the system state etc. which we can restore from, but we would have to create a VM first.

 

Thanks for the link, I've been looking for answers online, but could never find anything that wasn't written in VM geek! I'm assuming that I can go from 5.0 straight to 6.0.X? I thought I'd read somewhere that you had to go 5.0.x to 5.1 to 5.5 to 6?

 

Simple answer to your question - Yes you can upgrade from 5.x to 6.0.x straight up.

 

Is the physical server purely just for vCenter or for other services too?

My recommendation would be as follows:-

 

1. Migrate vCenter to a VM (if the physical server is for vCenter only than a simple P2V conversation will suffice, if its a shared service server than a proper migration would need to take place but that's not too hard either or even better just build a new vCenter setup and manually port the settings).

2. Upgrade vCenter unless taking the build new and port settings approach

3. Upgrade hosts via USB and change licenses to new ESX version

 

That is pretty much it. The reason I advice running vCenter in a VM is that A. it doesn't really need a physical box and if the physical box fails you've lost vCenter whereas in the VM cluster it will simply vMotion to a new host.

I would also STRONGLY recommend looking at Veeam as a VM backup solution, its cheap as chips to education and will backup your entire VM infrastructure to a 1 click restore setup, backing up the system states and then having to rebuild VM's with Windows and then restoring states is so old school.

[Tefters]

Ok, I would question why you want to upgrade to version 6?, bringing your hosts to version 5.5 is relatively painless with update manager, but i would get more comfortable with your vmware environment before version 6, at each stage you will need to upgrade vcenter server before the host upgrade, I'm assuming that you have an active contract with vmware?

 

ESX 6.0.x onwards now has a complete new architecture behind the scenes and DB model (Postgres) compared to SQL express so its better to get it out the way now as they have said that from version 6 on-wards this architecture and DB design wont change like it has from 5 to 6.

[aguacate]

Tefters,

 

I don't want to get into a discussion about the merits of vcenter physical or vm as both have merits, however vmotion does not work if your vcenter has failed, so your failover scenario described above is inaccurate, this is all academic as you can log on to your host individually however without vcenter.

[Tefters]

Tefters,

 

I don't want to get into a discussion about the merits of vcenter physical or vm as both have merits, however vmotion does not work if your vcenter has failed, so your failover scenario described above is inaccurate, this is all academic as you can log on to your host individually however without vcenter.

 

If vCenter or Windows fails vMotion doesn't work for obvious reasons hence the STRONG recommendation to look at VM backup software such a Veeam however if the actual VM host failed that the vCenter server was running on as a VM then there is a high chance it can survive or at least be recovered in minutes rather than hours.

 

An example snippit from VMware documentation:-

 

 

• Using VMware HA (if vCenter is virtualized) - RTO ~minutes. We should specify the highest priority for vCenter restart.
  
• For smaller environment, VMware Fault Tolerance in vSphere 6 allows to protect VMs up to 4 vCPU - RTO=0.
  

[JonThompson]

Ok, I would question why you want to upgrade to version 6?, bringing your hosts to version 5.5 is relatively painless with update manager, but i would get more comfortable with your vmware environment before version 6, at each stage you will need to upgrade vcenter server before the host upgrade, I'm assuming that you have an active contract with vmware?

 

Mainly because it's then running the latest software, and from what I understand upgrading from Version 6 onwards is supposed to be a lot simpler?

 

As for an active contract... I don't actually know. We were never given any VM documentation by Capita, so chances are probably not. Is there a way to find this out without contact VMware? (I mean do they have a site you can check your current status against?)

[aguacate]

JonThompson,

 

You will need an active contract to upgrade, speak to your supplier they can query VMware, if you don't have an active contract renew it, it is peanuts compared to other products and it is a vital piece of your IT infrastructure, version 5.5 is actively supported by vmware and has all the security upgrades on it, get comfortable with your vmware environment before upgrading to version 6, and as Tefters recommends get Veeam as you currently have no failover scenario if anything goes wrong.

[JonThompson]

JonThompson,

 

You will need an active contract to upgrade, speak to your supplier they can query VMware, if you don't have an active contract renew it, it is peanuts compared to other products and it is a vital piece of your IT infrastructure, version 5.5 is actively supported by vmware and has all the security upgrades on it, get comfortable with your vmware environment before upgrading to version 6, and as Tefters recommends get Veeam as you currently have no failover scenario if anything goes wrong.

 

Found it. We have an Academic Support/Subscription for three years which expires next year.