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VMware vSphere® 5.0 Upgrade

Best Practices

Introduction

VMware vSphere® 5.0 (“vSphere”) is a signiﬁcant milestone for VMware, introducing many new features and

capabilities. For many, the road to vSphere 5.0 will begin by upgrading existing vSphere environments.

Fortunately, included with the many new features and capabilities of vSphere 5.0 is a simple upgrade path that

makes it easy to migrate from VMware vCenter™ 4.x to vCenter 5.0 and from VMware ESXi™ 4.x to ESXi 5.0. And

for the ﬁrst time, users have the ability to do an in-place migration from VMware ESX® 4.x to ESXi 5.0. This paper

provides an overview of the ESXi 5.0 upgrade process, along with recommendations to help ensure a smooth

and seamless transition.

VMware vSphere 5.0 – What’s New

•Industry’s largest virtual machines – VMware can support even the largest applications with the introduction

of virtual machines that can grow to as many as 32 vCPUs and can use up to 1TB of memory. This enhancement

is 4x bigger than the previous release. vSphere can now support business-critical applications of any size

and dimension.

•vSphere High Availability (VMware HA) – New architecture ensures the most simpliﬁed setup and the best

guarantees for the availability of business-critical applications. Setup of the most widely used VMware HA

technology in the industry has never been easier. VMware HA can now be set up in just minutes.

•VMware vSphere® Auto Deploy – In minutes, you can deploy more vSphere hosts running the ESXi hypervisor

architecture “on the ﬂy.” After it is running, Auto Deploy simpliﬁes patching by enabling you to do a one-time

patch of the source ESXi image and then push the updated image out to your ESXi hosts, as opposed to the

traditional method of having to apply the same patch to each host individually.

•Proﬁle-Driven Storage – You can reduce the steps in the selection of storage resources by grouping storage

according to a user-deﬁned policy.

•vSphere Storage DRS – Automated load balancing now analyzes storage characteristics to determine the best

place for a given virtual machine’s data to live when it is created and then used over time.

•vSphere Web Client – This rich browser-based client provides full virtual machine administration, and now has

multiplatform support and optimized client/server communication, which delivers faster response and a more

ecient user experience that helps take care of business needs faster.

•VMware vCenter Appliance (VCSA) – This VMware vCenter Server™ preinstalled virtual appliance simpliﬁes

the deployment and conﬁguration of vCenter Server, slipstreams future upgrades and patching, and reduces

the time and cost associated with managing vCenter Server. (Upgrading to the VMware vCenter Appliance

from the installable vCenter Server is not supported.)

•Licensing Reporting Manager – With the new vSphere vRAM licensing introduced with vSphere 5.0,

vCenter Server is enabled to show not only installed licenses but the vRAM license memory pooling and its

real-time utilization. This allows administrators to see the beneﬁts of vRAM pooling and how to size as the

business grows.

vSphere Features No Longer Supported in vSphere 5.0

An important consideration when upgrading to vSphere 5.0 is knowing which legacy features have been

deprecated and are no longer supported. Consult the vSphere 5.0 Release Notes for a list of these features. If

your vSphere system includes optional VMware solutions or plug-ins, make sure they are compatible with the

vCenter Server version to which you are upgrading. Refer to the vSphere 5.0 Release Notes and the VMware

Product Interoperability Matrix at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/sim/interop_matrix.php.