They never tell us when things are going to release.

Upgrade to U1 now, get used to all things v8 and then upgrade to U2 when it ships.  The process takes less than an hour.

Make sure you have backups of your current vCenter from the VCSA and also power it off and take a cold snapshot. Don't take a live one.

Then you have nothing to worry about if something goes amiss. Even if you went straight to U2, you'll still be using AD over LDAPS until you re-configure it to use Azure. So I see no benefit of waiting.

I'd totally agree, install 8u1 as it's stable and wait till the first couple of patches for 8u2 before going to it

Excellent point. You DO NOT want to be a beta tester for VMware. Many of us are still upset over the SD card fiasco with 7.0U2. I killed and replaced over 10 SD cards in a 4 month period until I could replace all my servers with SSD drives.

Install U1 then patch it to the latest U1 iteration. Get used to the install / patching process. 

Let other people figure out the inevitable bugs and shortcomings of U2 and the once U2b or something comes out, upgrade to it.

I have been working with VMware products for over 15 years. I've seen the good, the bad and the ugly. Their releases lately leave a lot to be desired in their initial state.

Also agree. if you are installing vCenter for the first time, you'll probably want to do at least one round of build it up and tear it down, whilst you get everything how you want it and document your build process. 

I would crack on and start doing that with the vCenter that is available now. If U2 comes out in the meantime, do your final build with that version and implement AAD as an identity provider then. Everything else will pretty much be the same.

Even changing from one identity provider to another isn't that big a deal. I'm sure U2 will work just fine, but only you can decide whether to go with U2 off the bat, or wait a while until any potential issues that might or might not arise, are ironed out. 

HTH

Thanks for all the replies, it totally makes sense to build it 'now' and change the auth method later once U2 is available (or at least a later iteration of U2), completely understand the reasons not to go for an initial build version, but assumed more to do with initial v8.0 rather than v8.0 update 'x'.

Thanks again,

Steve

If nothing else @scouser_steve its good practise!

Especially if you're deploying vCenter or vSphere for the first time. You'll need a few practice runs get the build and configuration right 

We have separate test environment where we can test it and after grace period to decide implement it on prod or not