While every Administrator wants to constantly upgrade Infrastructure to “N” state and leverage the latest and greatest capabilities of the hypervisor, the amount of validation that administrator has to carry on the server ecosystem is too cumbersome – validating multiple compatibility matrix across Server, Storage and Network OEMs. This gets even more complex when we have multiple x86 OEMs on the Infrastructure.
Until 2019, Two VMware Products that was close to most of the administrators but had little improvements in capabilities for long time has been vSphere Update Manager and SRM. Both are an administrator’s dependable workhorse which has not only been resilient but has solved a critical business requirement with such simplicity . 2019 has been exciting seeing enhancements that are being made to Update Manager and SRM. On all my discussions with various Product Managers from VMware and Customer Advisory meetings, I have been advocating improvements in Assessment and Reporting part of vSphere Update Manager. From Assessment stand-point, have been requesting for enhancements to update manager to perform assessment or prerequisite validation and from reporting stand-point wanted integration of Update Manager to vROps or vCenter Server so that we can report in ease back to the management considering these days the frequency of upgrades are increasing due to multiple vulnerabilities and its relevant patching need.
This is why I was excited about the General Availability of vSphere Assessment Tool recently and quickly evaluated the capabilities and it is definitely a much needed one! It’s going to help all of us in saving lots and lots of time and effort in assessing a global landscape with ease.
vSphere Assessment Tool is a free assessment service from VMware and consists of two tiers – Client (Download & Install) to gather information from hosts through vCenter Server and an Online Portal/Service where the recorded data in analyzed and results shared in a Simple and Concise UI.
- Sign-In to vSphere Assessment Portal using your VMware Account.
- Click “Download the tool” to download the client to your desktop/server. Client is available for Windows, OS X and Linux platforms.
- Install the Client and this is a straightforward installation.
- Once Installed, Please open the client and add vCenter Servers for data gathering. You can add multiple vCenter Servers and run together or discretely by choosing only specific vCenter Servers.
- Once you choose vCenter Servers and Click “Run Data Collection“
- Data gathering completes in a matter on minutes and once completed, Click Proceed and you can either “Send Collected Data” or my preference would be to download the file and upload the same from the Online Portal.
- Once downloaded, we can also review the downloaded file to validate the information that is gathered.
- Login back to the portal and Click “Upload File“
- For added security, There is a unique vSAT Passcode that is available on the portal that needs to be entered while uploading and the same is available when you login every time in the portal itself.
- Upload the downloaded file from the Client
- Upload is quick again and once analyzed it quickly displays the output in a neat dashboard as shown below
- You can choose version for which you are looking to upgrade and it displays clearly below if the host is compatible or Not Supported.
- The vSphere Assessment tool shows the Compatible status of a host potential for vSphere upgrade, and will display a breakdown of the following components support status: Server Model > Network Devices > Storage Devices Drivers
- Click on “Supported” or “Not Supported” to showcase the compatibility output
There are still few enhancements (like why not integrate with Update Manager or vROps ) that can be made and there are few hosts that are not being assessed every time i run but then this is a very very good starting point considering the goodness in the tool !!
Hybrid Cloud Ramblings 