vCenter Server Appliance

Upgrading your vCenter Server Appliance from 6.5 to 6.7

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On April 17th we released the latest update to our vSphere product line vSphere 6.7. vSphere 6.x has been one of our fastest adopted product versions with many people now moving to the appliance. We have already received quite a few questions on what the new upgrade process looks like, so we will discuss two Read more...

vSphere 6.5 Update 2 Now Available

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By now, you may have heard, that vSphere 6.7 was released on April 17th which included many new features and enhancements. Customers who are currently on vSphere 6.0 (any version) or 6.5 (GA & Update 1 versions) have a direct upgrade path to vSphere 6.7. Keep in mind that vSphere 5.5 will be reaching its Read more...

vCenter High Availability Deep Dive – Part 2

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The first post in this series covered vCenter High Availability deployment types and considerations. Hopefully, by now you’ve gotten your VCHA cluster deployed and are ready to move on with some of the operational aspects such as backup & restore, patching, and upgrades to the VCHA cluster. The continuation of this blog series will dive into each feature Read more...

vCenter High Availability Deep Dive – Part 1

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vCenter High Availability (VCHA) was introduced in vSphere 6.5 in November 2016. Since that time the Technical Marketing team has spent a lot of time creating content and speaking about VCHA. Much of that content can be found on vSphere Central. Even with all that content, there are still some common questions and misconceptions regarding Read more...
Introducing vCenter Server 6.7

Introducing vCenter Server 6.7

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vSphere 6.7 is here! and the vCenter Server Appliance is now the default deployment. This release is full of new enhancements for the vCenter Server Appliance in all areas. Now customers have more tooling to help with monitoring. The vSphere Client (HTML5) is full of new workflows and closer to feature parity. The vCenter Server Read more...

Platform Services Controller (PSC) 6.x FAQ Now Available

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The Platform Services Controller (PSC) was introduced in vSphere 6.0 as a mechanism to simplify and centralize common vSphere infrastructure services. The PSC handles vSphere single sign-on (SSO), licensing, tagging, global permissions, custom roles, and certificate management. Prior to the PSC, most of these services were individually managed such as tagging and licensing while global Read more...

Understanding the Impacts of Mixed-Version vCenter Server Deployments

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There are a few questions that come up quite often regarding vCenter Server upgrades and mixed-versions that we would like to address. In this blog post we will discuss and attempt to clarify the guidance in the vSphere Documentation for Upgrade or Migration Order and Mixed-Version Transitional Behavior for Multiple vCenter Server Instance Deployments. This Read more...

Monthly Security Patch Program for the vCenter Server Appliance

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The vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) has become the recommended deployment type starting with vSphere 6.5. The three main components of the VCSA – operating system, database, and application – now all fall under VMware’s umbrella. The VCSA now uses Photon OS which is a custom operating system built from the ground up for virtualization and removes Read more...

Farewell, vCenter Server for Windows

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VMware plans to deprecate vCenter Server for Windows with the next numbered release (not update release) of vSphere.  The next version of vSphere will be the terminal release for which vCenter Server for Windows will be available. Why Is VMware deprecating vCenter Server for Windows? VMware is consistently striving to simplify data center administration and Read more...

vSphere 6.5 Upgrade Considerations Part-3

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Update 10/3/17 – by request requirements and decisions section has been added for the example scenario and blog post updated to reflect these changes. We’ve started out by discussing the concepts and processes that make up a successful vSphere 6.5 Upgrade. Then it was time to take what we’ve learned in the first blog post of this Read more...