Lathrop & Gage like many other firms, is getting ready to make the jump to vSphere 5 and developing a detailed plan with many pre-requisites which are very important in order to complete a smooth and successful upgrade. Todd Russell, Network Engineer at Lathrop & Gage, put together such plan and has been executing it over the last few weeks. He put a great deal of effort in making sure that the Cisco 1000v upgrade went smooth and one of the road blocks he hit was finding the proper documentation to complete this upgrade. According to Todd "There seems to be this disconnect still between Cisco and VMware in certain areas of the 1000v support. Most of it is geared toward not filling in the back story so customers know when to use each. I'm going to attempt to save some users two days on the phone with support by listing out here what took me two days to get from both vendors to perform a 1000v upgrade prior to upgrading to vSphere 5."
Some of the tasks that Todd outlined on this plan and should be completed before going for the actual vSphere upgrade include but are not limited to:
- If you have a Cisco 1000v in place, then you may need to upgrade its firmware to the supported version (4a.)
- Upgrading your Hosts’ firmware, in Lathrop & Gage's case Cisco UCS (must be at version 2.)
- In the case of Cisco UCS, make sure that all Service Profiles and Port Profiles are configured properly.
- If you are using FCoE on the Cisco Data Center environment (UCS and Nexus Switches), then make sure that your VSANs and VLANs do not overlap.
- Upgrading VMware tools and drivers on your guests.
- Check hardware compatibility and BIOS and firmware versions for any physical servers currently running ESX or ESXi to verify in-place upgradeability.
- If possible, always perform a P2V and/or clone of your vSphere server and perform a test upgrade with the network offline to see how it will behave during your window. If this is unsuccessful, you will have time to plan accordingly as to why.
- Depending on any storage vendors, make sure ALL storage drivers and firmware are compatible with 5 before upgrading. This includes: EqualLogic, LeftHand, EMC, PowerPath, NetApp, 3PAR, etc.
- Verify all backup programs used in conjunction with vSphere are compatible with 5 also. NDMP, Snapshot and network backups may all go through vCenter depending on the version and if any section is incompatible, backups may not be working nor supported. Please check this first. This may stop the upgrade process indefinitely depending on the products you may use.
After navigating through a painful information search regarding the upgrade of the Nexus 1000v and finalizing the upgrade Todd posted a blog entry in the VMware community site, which I recommend you read if you are pursuing this path.
Here is the link to the blog: http://tinyurl.com/7rgrvc9
Todd can be reached at TRussell@lathropgage.com for more information on his road to vSphere 5. You can also leave a comment if you are interested in hearing more about the upgrade and would like to have follow up blog entries on the topic. Also, let us know if you are going through the process and hit any roadblocks or issues and how you went around them.
Hope you enjoy this post as much as I did
Posted by Kevin K. Moore, Director of IT, Fenwick & West LLP
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