VMware Cloud Community
Soap01
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Upgrade/Fresh Deployment Query

Curious how the community is handling their vCenter version upgrades. Are you typically doing in-place upgrades for minor update revisions and then deploying fresh when you get to a major version release or are you just doing in-place upgrades all the time? For my environment (400 hosts / 7000 virtual machines / 4 vCenter instances) we have been performing in-place upgrades since 5.5 (windows) to where we are today which is 6.5 (vcsa). I am currently in a holding pattern to see when the next major release will come and deciding how that upgrade process will develop out. The only thing that has always worried me about the new deployment is handling all of the distributed virtual switches in the environment since it adds a layer of risk when dealing with it. I am curious to see how others are handling upgrades. Thanks in advance for the comments.

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daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

Most customers are on the vCSA where major version upgrades (6.5 => 6.7) are essentially new deployments from an appliance/OS perspective but are effectively migrations from the application's perspective. This is made super simple in the vCSA with automation handling everything for you. Simply put, there are very few reasons why one would want to do a manual re-deploy of a vCSA across major versions.

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Soap01
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

This is what I would have thought as well, but I have heard from various internal vmware people that they still recommend new fresh deployments on major version upgrades and wanted to see if the community shared that thought.

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daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

I have never heard such a recommendation from any VMware employees, even anecdotally, after the vCSA came to market. Not saying there aren't some reasons for this, but it definitely is neither generally recommended nor a widespread practice.

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