vSphere 6.0 show stopers? What to deploy for a new cluster?

[de2rfg]

Hi,

vSphere 6.0 is still bleeding edge - I know. But I have to deploy 2 new clusters in the next couple of weeks and it would really be nice to start with 6.0. Are there already any known show stoppers after the first GA week?

It wouldn't be a big problem to install the ESXi hosts with 5.5 and upgrade later to 6.0. But I wouldn't like to upgrade the vCenter server after a couple of months, because the new Cross vSwitch and vCenter vMotion are important things for these new clusters.

I upgraded to 5.1 really soon after GA and was bitten by some SSO problems, but in the end it wasn't that bad.

[illvilja]

It depends on the rest of your infrastructure.

Are your servers supported?

Storage?

Backup?

etc

[de2rfg]

At the 2 new locations we will be using Fujitsu server. There is no 6.0 Image from Fujitsu at the moment. I opened a ticket there to get an idea when this will be available. I think if we start only with vCenter 6.0 only backup would be a problem, because we use HP Data Protector which does not support 6.0 for VADP yet. On the other hand.... we still backup VMs with an agent installed on the VM, so there is no dependency to VADP.

[illvilja]

And Fujitsu doesn't offer the drivers as a separate download?

Yeah, if you don't use VADP for backups and still do guest agents it's like you say, not a dependency.

What about storage?

[de2rfg]

IBM V3700, according to VMware Compatibility Guide: Storage/SAN Search it's supported. I'm not sure about applications that are running on the VMs, I know that many vendors mention the supported vSphere versions. But as long as we only use the 6.0 vCenter server and 5.5 hosts, I guess we are good.