VSphere 6 Lab Upgrade
Written by Sam McGeown
on 2/4/2015
I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab – basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
Now 6 has been GA a while and I have a little bit of time, I have begun the lab upgrade process. You can see a bit more about my lab hardware over on my
Written by Sam McGeown
on 2/4/2015I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab – basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
Now 6 has been GA a while and I have a little bit of time, I have begun the lab upgrade process. You can see a bit more about my lab hardware over on my
Written by Sam McGeown
on 1/4/2015I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab - basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
I will be upgrading
- vCenter Server Appliance - currently 5.5 update 1
- vSphere Update Manager - currently 5.5 update 1
- 3 HP N54L resource hosts
- 1 Intel NUC management host
In my lab I run various VMware software suites listed below, although I typically run them in nested environments to keep my lab install relatively clean.
Written by Sam McGeown
on 1/4/2015I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab - basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
Checking for driver compatibility
In vSphere 5.5, VMware dropped the drivers for quite a few consumer grade NICs - in 6 they’ve gone a step further and actually blocked quite a few of these using a VIB package. For more information, see this excellent article by Andreas Peetz.
Written by Sam McGeown
on 1/4/2015I tested vSphere 6 quite intensively when it was in beta, but I didn’t ever upgrade my lab - basically because I need a stable environment to work on and I wasn’t sure that I could maintain that with the beta.
Upgrading the vCenter Server Appliance
Download and mount the VMware-VCSA-all-6.0.0-2562643 ISO image (mounted as G:\ on my workstation).
Browse the ISO and run the Client Integration Plugin “G:\vcsa\VMware-ClientIntegrationPlugin-6.0.0.exe” - it’s a simple next, next finish sort of install.