Jumpstart Your vSphere Upgrade With The vSphere Assessment Tool!
We are excited to announce the availability of the vSphere Assessment Tool (vSAT).
Looking to review your environment before upgrading to a new release of vSphere? Look no further than the vSphere Assessment Tool!
The vSphere Assessment Tool plays a crucial part in any vSphere upgrade journey, providing insights into critical workloads that may be at risk from out of support vSphere versions. The vSphere Assessment Tool alerts customers to hardware challenges prior to a vSphere upgrade.
Preparing for an upgrade of any critical system within a production environment requires planning its architecture, its end state, and if the current hardware supports the upgrade. The vSphere Assessment Tool streamlines the process of identifying hardware components that may not be supported, or may require replacement in order to upgrade to the latest vSphere release.
What Makes Up The Tool?
The vSphere Assessment Tool is made up of two components; a desktop client which is downloaded locally and collects hardware information against the vCenter Servers you would like to analyze, and an online portal called the vSphere Assessment portal. The portal provides the most up to date information on hardware compatibility and displays your environment and its hardware components in a user-friendly and interactive format.
Let’s dive in on how to use the tool!
Getting Started
To get started with the vSphere Assessment tool, go to the vSphere Assessment Tool Website. From here, you can click on the “Get Started” button, and either sign up with a new account or use your existing MyVMware ID. Once authenticated, you will gain access to the vSphere Assessment Portal, where you can download the vSphere Assessment Tool desktop client. The desktop client supports Windows, OSX & Linux operating systems.
Lanching the vSAT desktop client provides an interface to add all the vCenter Servers you would wish to analyze.
To collect all the information with the vSAT desktop Client, a user requires either a custom user role with “Host Settings” privileges, or an administrator account.
Uploading Collections
After the collection process has completed, there are two main options to upload your results for analysis.
1. Online Upload
Built within the desktop client, you have the option to upload your results directly to the vSphere Assessment portal using the vSAT passcode. By default, every user has a unique passcode associated with their account profile, ensuring that data uploads are secure and only viewable via the associated MyVMware account.
If you are not sure what your vSAT passcode is you can select “Forgot Your vSAT passcode?” in the desktop client. Alternatively, you can retrieve your Passcode from the account menu in the vSAT Portal.
2. Offline Upload
The desktop client can save your results locally and upload data directly into the vSphere Assessment Portal. Customers are recommended to use this option if they are unable to upload via the online method.
Reviewing Collections Results
The dashboard view provides a user-friendly interface for customers to explore and navigate the uploaded results. Customers can drill down from the vCenter Server to specific hosts using the left panel navigation, much like the vSphere Client.
The summary view provides a breakdown of the different editions of vSphere in your estate and provides insight into which hosts are at risk of unsupported versions of vSphere. To get additional information on the hosts, simply click any host in the host table to display the host details panel.
The host details panel displays information on the current vSphere version, server model, network & storage adapters. Each vSphere version and hardware component indicates if support has been verified.
This has been a brief look at the vSphere Assessment Tool. For more information or to try the tool out today, please visit the vSphere Assessment Tool Portal!
Stay tuned for news on more features regarding the vSphere Assessment Tool.
