VMware vSphere 4.1 to 5.1 Upgrade

VMware vSphere 4.1 to 5.1 Upgrade

1. Stop vCenter Services

2. Install vCenter 5.1

3. Install vCenter Update Manager

4. Install vSphere Client

5. Login to New vCenter 5.1 Console using vSphere Client

6. Install Update Manager Plugins

7  Upgrade ESXi Hosts using Update Manager

Whats new in VMware vSphere 5.5

1. Hot Pluggable SSD PCI Express (PCIe) Device

2. Support for Reliable Memory Technology (Some part of CPU will be allocated to ESXi Host to use HOSTD and WatchDog Process to avaoid memory crass)

3. Power Policy Setting for DPM (High Performance/Balanced/Low Power/Custom)

4. New SATA Controller

5. VM Hardware Version 10

6. Expanded vGPU Support (nVedia)

7. Graphic Acceleration for Linux Guests

8. Simplified SSO

9. vSphere Web Client Enhacement (Drag and Drop, Filters, Recent Items)

10. vSphere App HA : In earlier version you had the ability to monitor virtual machines heartbeat using VMware Tools. In Vsphere 5.5 you can leverage third party application monitoring agents or create their own agents using VMware vSphere Guest SDK. vSphere APP HAcan be configured to restart an application service when issue is detected. It is possible to protect several commonly used, off-the-shelf applications. vSphere HA can also     reset the virtual machine if the application fails to restart. Two Virtual Appliances per vCenter.

11. vSphere BIG Data Extension - It's a tool that enables administrators to deploy and manage Hadoop Clusters on vSphere from a Familiar vSphere Web Client interface. Support - Apache Pig, Apache Hive & Apache HBase. Hadoop Clusters can be protected easily using VMware vSphere HA and FT

12.  vSphere Storage Enhancement : 62 TB VMDK and 62 TB RDM

13. PDL Mode Auto Remove (Permanent Device Loss) - that can occur when a disk device either fails or removed from the vSphere host in an uncontrolled fashion. With vSphere 5.5 host can take necessary steps to prevent directing unnecessary IO to this device. This alleviates other conditions  that might arise on the host as a result of this unnecessary IO.

14. vSphere Flash Read Cache

15. Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) now uses 22 new HASH Algorithms

16. Trafic Filtering - ACL

17. Quality of Service Tagging - Help to achieve end-to-end QoS

18. Enhanced Host Level Packet Capture

19. Support of 40GB NIC - This functionalities is delivered via Mellanox ConnextX-3 VPI Adapters configured in Ethernet Mode.