Comments on: Upgrade your Virtual Hardware in a few minutes, with a twist.

By: Ajay

Ajay — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 11:20:40 +0000

These requirements are not so bad. It's something that I've expected, and I've already got my eyes on a used computer hardware place so I start renewing everything. Thank you for the info.

By: MrLoftcraft

MrLoftcraft — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 10:42:02 +0000

I guess we have to wait a little bit for some feedback from people that actually upgraded to version 7.0 and see how they manage with it. We could debate for hours here, but the real thing is always what counts.

By: VM Dude

VM Dude — Thu, 20 May 2010 10:25:50 +0000

Makes it look simple, sure but what is done above is trivial to the process as far as the big picture goes for an Enterprise. The amount of paperwork/red tape work that this type of thing done against a massive number of VMs is the real issue. Getting an outage for so many VMs, coordinating outages for VMs with dependencies, Change Management will require backups and rollback options (rollback for hw upgrade can be a copy of the .vmx file before) etc… This is where the real time is consumed in such an upgrade

By: sketchy00

sketchy00 — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:00:31 +0000

Ah… yeah, I suppose when you are putting it in the context of 1,000 vms, I can now understand what you were attempting to demonstrate. I was kicking myself a bit for what was an otherwise great upgrade process to vsphere, and I simply didn't pay enough attention to the virtual hardware upgrade. The ease of upgrading from virtual hardware 4 to 7 made me trivialize the matter. …my bad.

Keep up the great posts.

By: scottsauer

scottsauer — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:21:13 +0000

Sketchy00,
Thanks for the comments. What I was trying to suggest is that there is a lot of work involved in upgrading to vSphere, and this is only one of the steps that needs to be performed as part of the upgrade process. We have an environment that consists of ~1000 virtual machines so my attempt was to try to demonstrate how quickly you can knock this out.

Introducing a change in your environment is always going to open you up to some risk. I suggest creating snapshots and testing this process out before you upgrade your production virtual machine environment. Snapshots will in fact capture changes that take place when going from version 4 to version 7.

I read your article and that is great technical feedback for users to be aware of as they are going through this process.

By: sketchy00

sketchy00 — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:31:19 +0000

Screwing up machines is always faster than fixing them. It sounds like you are suggesting that the speed and hasle of touching VM's when changing them over to Virtual Hardware level 7 is the reason behind the population not doing so. I think there is more to it. I wrote about my experiences to upgrading VMs to level 7 here: http://itforme.wordpress.com/2010/01/17/side-ef...

Hope this saves someone's tail.

By: jasonspruance

jasonspruance — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:46:20 +0000

Nice post. You are right, it only takes a few minutes.