upgrades

When Should I Upgrade to VMware vSphere 6?

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I’ve been asked a few times about when I’m planning to upgrade to VMware vSphere 6. Truth is, I don’t know. A Magic 8 Ball would say “reply hazy, try again.” Some people say that you should wait until the first major update, like the first update pack or first service pack. I’ve always thought that approach is crap. Software is a rolling collection of bugs. Some are old, some are new, and while vendors try to make the number of bugs go down the truth is that isn’t the case all the time. Especially with large releases, like service packs. The real bug fixing gains are, to borrow a baseball term, in the “small ball” between the big plays. …

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My Thoughts on Upgrading to vSphere 5

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about upgrading to vSphere 5, mainly the questions of when and how I’d like to get it done. During the launch on July 12th there was a lot of talk about how many QA hours went into vSphere 5 (2 million+). That’s good news. We had some serious problems with vSphere 4 when we deployed it, bugs all over the place, vCenter crashing every couple of days, etc. VMware support wasn’t super helpful in fixing the problems because they didn’t have much experience, and they were unwilling or unable to get Engineering involved. As a result I took a lot of crap from my coworkers about my decision to upgrade things so quickly. To …

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