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vSphere 5.0 & 5.1 End of General Support Coming

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vsphere 5.0 5.1 end of general support

Just a little Public Service Announcement and reminder.  vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 end of general support is coming soon.  End of General Support for ESXi 5.0/5.1 along with vCenter 5.0/5.1 and ancillary products (SRM 5.0/5.1, Data Recovery 2.0, Update Manager 5.0/5.1) is set for 2016-08-28.

What does End of General Support mean?

General Support provides full support of the product, which includes:

  • Phone Support
  • Maintenance Updates
  • Upgrades
  • Bug and Security Fixes

So what happens to vSphere 5.0/5.1 now?

vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 now enter the technical guidance phase.  While phone support is not provided, help can be obtained through a self-help portal.  You can also still receive support and potential solutions for low severity problems.  You can get further details here.

So what should customers running 5.0/5.1 do?

I recommend customers should look to upgrade to vSphere 5.5 or 6.0.  If you have a valid support contract, it shouldn’t cost you anything to upgrade as far as licensing goes.  It’s important to verify your hardware is supported though, including:

  • Servers
  • Storage, whether it be a traditional storage array, or internal controller, or hyper-converged solution
  • I/O cards
    • HBAs
    • NICs
  • Third party products, such as
    • Backup products
    • Orchestration
    • Monitoring
    • VDI

While it’s not absolutely critical to upgrade exactly by 8/28/2016, plans should be made to upgrade.  You don’t want to handle that upgrade in a hurry!

Final tips

If you’re upgrading, be aware that you can mix ESXi versions with vCenter versions.  For this reason, if there’s a specific reason you can’t/don’t want to upgrade to ESXi 6.0, you can upgrade your hosts to 5.5, and run vCenter 6.0, assuming your other products are compatible with vCenter 6.  That might make it easier to upgrade to subsequent versions of vCenter or ESXI down the road.  You might want to consider the vCenter Appliance.

Happy upgrading!

No, seriously, I’m gonna blog again now

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You know the saying when it rains, it pours?

After my last blog entry where I promised to blog more again, we had two deaths in the family (one on my side, one on my wife’s side).  Plus, our dog of 10 months old became ill, and come to find out after tests and what not, she had an undeveloped kidney that eventually had to be removed, so we’ve had to keep a constant eye on her and what not.  She’s still recovering, but she’s slowly getting back to her lovable self.

Free time has been pretty sparse, so blogging took a back seat.

Well, it’s time to get back into the habit, so here we go!  No, like, seriously this time!  I mean it!

(Anybody want a peanut?)

Long Time No Blog

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It’s been one of those last few weeks where I was out of town, stuff came up, and many of my posts became half baked, and I didn’t have time finish them up.  I just realized it’s been three weeks since a blog post.  Yikes!

So…  expect some more posts coming.  vCloud Air stuff, a good RecoverPoint walkthrough post, and I’ve got some home automation stuff I’ve been messing with.

Enjoy!

Long time no blog

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Sitting down here to start writing out some blog posts.  Obviously, if you’ve kept up with my blog at all, you’ll know I haven’t been keeping with my schedule of trying to do three blog posts a week.

This is because:

  1. I think three blog posts a week is overly ambitious on my part.  It kinda led me a bit to burn out a bit on blogging, but honestly, it also made me try to churn out posts instead of stuff I want to do more of when I blog – more in depth posts about topics. That didn’t help keep me motivated to do it. So for now, I’m going to try to post twice a week from here on out, but if I feel so inclined, you might see three.
  2. It’s hard to post at VMworld on an iPad.  Or maybe it’s just hard for someone starting out trying to blog regularly to do it while at a conference.  I dunno, but what I do know is I didn’t blog like I wanted to there.
  3. Our dog, Megan, who we had for 14 years, we had to put down.  We don’t have any children, so she was like a child to us in a way.  It was heartbreaking to try to figure out what was wrong, what to do, watching her everyday, etc.  My wife also took it really hard, as they were especially joined to the hip, so to speak.  It wasn’t a quick thing, and I just think, probably understandably, I had zero motivation to blog going through that.  The very next week, my wife had shoulder surgery, so a lot of the day to day stuff she does fell on me for a while, so something had to take a back seat, so blogging was one of them.  Now, I’ve got my proverbial crap together in my head, so I’m ready to go!

So, expect to see some more blog posts you hopefully find valuable coming.

Let’s do this!

VMworld – What I’m looking forward to

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Almost every year, I go to VMworld to learn about all things new and coming down the pike, learn about products related to virtualization, and to network with colleagues.

This year is no different.  I’m a VMworld alumni, having attended in 2009, 2011, 2012, and 2014.  VMworld is a great time to catch up on everything and with everyone in the community.

My wife travels with me usually when I go.  If you have someone travelling with you, but isn’t attending the conference, I highly recommend checking out Spousetivities.  Put together by Crystal Lowe, these are activities created for people to attend while people they are travelling with attend the conference.  Crystal does a fantastic job coming up with things to do, and it’s a great way to have fun and meet new people.

This year, we were able to also find an Alaskan cruise leaving from San Francisco and arrives back in San Francisco on the morning when VMworld technically starts.  Really looking forward to that!

Back to VMworld, the things I always look forward to are the hands on labs, the Solutions Exchange, and sessions.  If you’re not familiar with VMworld, the hands on labs allow you to bring your own device or use their setup terminals (usually what I do because I’m not wanting to bring my laptop to carry around all day, and I find using an iPad frustrating for labs), and get hands on experience with new VMware and other partners’ products and features.  It’s great!

Solutions Exchange is basically a vendor expo where you can learn about various vendors and their solutions that are related to virtualization.  I don’t know how many times I’ve discovered new products or solutions that solved problems for customers here.

And the sessions… SO MANY AWESOME SESSIONS!  I can’t fit them all in!  Here are a few sessions I’m looking forward to.

SDDC6683-SPO – Getting Ready for the Next Wave of IT Convergence with Cisco UCS – SyCom does a lot of work with Cisco including UCS, so I need to keep up to speed with what’s new with that line of products.

STO5605 – What’s New in Site Recovery Manager – I’ve done many Site Recovery Manager engagements.  It’s normally easy to find what new features are in the next version, but what I like about these sessions is they often give you interesting perspectives on how to use these features properly, or in a creative manner.

STO6556-GD – Stretched Clusters with Lee Dilworth – I’ve recently deployed a stretched vSphere cluster in version 5.5, so I take personal interest in this topic.  It’s good to hear how others are doing it, and pick up on any tips.

STO5822 – Putting Virtual Volumes to Work – Storage Best Practices for vSphere 6 and Beyond – I think vVols are a big new feature in vSphere 6.  But I also know that they won’t always be the best solution for all customers and/or for all workloads.  I love sessions like this because, while I think I already have a good grasp about the topic, I always learn some new things to think about.

ELW-SDC-1630 – Cloud Native Apps Workshop – If you think all workloads are basically the same, have basically the same thresholds for performance, etc., you’re wrong.  I came from working with the storage I/O hog that was Exchange 2003, where you needed pretty low storage latency.  But cloud native apps generally can accept very high latency.  This is just one example of how cloud native apps can differ radically from the workloads you typically see, and I want to know more.

SDDC4595 – Ask the Expert Industry Titans – A mainstay tradition for sessions.  It’s Chad Sakac and Vaughn Stewart, plus others, answering any questions that are brought to the floor.  It’s going to be a blast.

SDDC6642 – The Bleeding Edge: A Face-melting Technical Smorgasbord of Private, Hybrid and PaaS – It’s Chad Sakac talking about cool new stuff.  Plus, face-melting is in the freakin’ session title!  Do I really need to say more?

INF4529 – VMware Certificate Management for Mere Mortals – Let’s face it, certificate management in vSphere hasn’t exactly been completely easy.  Since there’s new tools to manage them, I wanted to get caught up to speed.

NET4976 – vSphere Distributed Switch 6.0 – Technical Deep Dive – Always a great session if it’s Jason Nash and Chris Wahl.

What sessions are you looking forward to?