End of support for vSphere 6.5.x and 6.7.x

In case you missed it, last week marked the end of general support for vSphere 6.5 and 6.7. This is the same regardless of whether you were using it for data centre services or EUC services like Horizon.

Please review this kb for more information on the end of support and upgrade advice

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/89305

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Installation and Configuration of vCenter 6.5

For many years, almost everyone installed vCenter on Windows. This was mainly due to the increased scale of the Windows platform over the appliance. Nobody wanted to install the inferior appliance version unless it was in a lab. But over the last few years the gap has closed and now they are on par with each other. So when you take into account Windows and SQL licensing costs, and the single platform for support to fix in case of issues it’s a bit of a bit of a no brainer now to switch to the appliance version. You’ll be glad to hear that there is even a tool in the latest version to help you migrate over from Windows to appliance.

vSphere ESXi 6.5

ESXi 6.5 is the latest update by VMware to its bare metal hypervisor. I know from experience that despite there being many updates in the versions, the installation has remained largely the same, so I was keen to see if 6.5 kept up the tradition. 

vSphere ESXI 6.0 Installation and Configuration

ESXi has come a long way over the last few years in terms of features and functionality, but one of the other things VMware has done has been to dramatically simplify the hypervisor installer. ESXi v6 is by far the easiest version i’ve ever installed. Here are the steps:

Upgrading vRealize Operations Manager 6.0

If you thought that deploying vROPS was easy, you’ll love how simple it is to upgrade. What’s more it involved minimal risk and only a small amount of downtime. Here’s how to do it.

Deploying Log Insight 3.0

Log Insight is VMware’s log management and analytics product. It can collect unstructured log data from many different sources from VMware products, to Cisco and EMC. What’s more it works hand in hand with vRealize Operations to combine symptoms from vROPS and LogInsight and deliver effective monitoring. The server itself is a virtual appliance and is dead easy to install. Here’s how.

Deploying vRealize Operations Manager 6.1

vRealize Operations Manager or vROPS as it’s commonly known is part of VMware’s cloud management suite of products. This is an operations monitoring tool which can also do capacity planning and much more. One of the things i love about vROPS is how simple it is to use and the value it can give you using out of the box functionality. Deploying it is very easy too, and here’s how.