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Few #migrate2vcsa VMworld sessions & HOL worth checking out

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One thing that I had noticed at VMworld last week was that there was a lot of excitement and buzz coming from our customers/partners around migrating from a Windows based vCenter Server to the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I am pretty sure it had nothing to do with the awesome #migrate2vcsa stickers that my buddy Emad had created.

migrate2vcsa-sticker
or the killer #migrate2vcsa apparel ...

In all seriousness, I do think our customers are genuinely excited about this upcoming migration capability and the value of the VCSA over the Windows vCenter Server. This is especially true for simplified lifecycle management from deployment (Day 0), configuration (Day 1), patching and upgrade (Day 2) of the VCSA. Customers not only benefit from the operational aspect of the VCSA, but it also allows them to reduce their overall Windows licensing footprint for both the vCenter Server as well as the backend database which is usually a Microsoft SQL Server or an Oracle Database. I do understand that this is not the goal of all customers, but I also know of many customers who do appreciate this additional CapEx savings.

At VMworld this year, there was a ton of coverage across a variety of topics for the VCSA including Migration, Deployment, Management, Operations and most dearest to my heart, Automation which spans all of these areas. I thought it would be useful to share some of the content in the form of publicly available VMworld sessions that you can view regardless if you attended VMworld or not. I know many of you have been asking about the VCSA Migration Tool and all I can say is check out the resources below and stay tune for an update real soon 😀

#migrate2vcsa Sessions:

#migrate2vcsa HOL (simulation):

I just found out about this, but it looks like our Hands-On-Labs folks also built a nice VCSA Migration simulation HOL (http://docs.hol.vmware.com/hol-isim/HOL-2017/hol-1710-vcsamigration.htm) that you can try out which gives you a sneak peak at a Tech Preview of the VCSA Migration Tool. You simply follow the instructions to the right and it walks you through the simulation and highlighting what you need to perform via the orange colored icon. I thought this was a very neat solution for folks to get an idea of how something works without having to sit through hours of content. migrate2vcsa-hol

Lastly, here are some of the general vCenter Server / VCSA sessions that are also worth checking out.

General VCSA Sessions:

PowerCLI script to help correlate vCenter, ESXi & vSAN build/versions w/o manual VMware KB lookup

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I can still remember when I was a VI Admin and how annoying it was to try to correlate the build numbers for my ESX(i) hosts and vCenter Servers that I have deployed with the versions listed on VMware's website. This especially gets challenging when there are multiple patch releases (a, b, c or 01, 02, 03) in between major releases (5.5, 6.0, 6.0u1, 6.0u2, 6.5, etc.). Historically, most customers including myself would retrieve the respective build numbers and then manually comparing them to either the release notes and/or download website which was very tedious.

Although VMware has exposed the version number within our vSphere products since day 1 which can also be retrieved programmatically using the vSphere API (here), it unfortunately does not provide more details than simply the major/minor version (e.g. 5,5, 6.0, 6.5, etc) of the software. Recently, VMware had released a series of VMware KBs which provides a mapping between the build numbers for vCenter Server, ESXi and vSAN to their respective versions which can be found in the links below:

These are definitely a great set of resources that I know many customers including myself have been using since its release. Having said that, the process today is still pretty manual since you need to manually retrieve the build numbers for either a VC, ESXi or vSAN Host (can be automated using vSphere APIs) and then comparing that to the KBs to get the correct versions. How cool would it be if you could *easily* just point to YOUR environment and retrieve the version information for either a vCenter Server (Windows or VCSA), ESXi host(s) or vSAN host(s) without needing to manually perform this lookup each time? Well, I have just done that! I have taken all three KBs and converted that information into a simple PowerCLI script called VCESXivSANBuildVersion.ps1 leveraging our vSphere API and it provides three functions:

  • Get-VCVersion - Retrieves the vCenter Server version given a VC connection
  • Get-ESXiVersion - Retrieves the ESXi version for all hosts given a vSphere Cluster
  • Get-VSANVersion - Retrieves the vSAN version for all hosts given a vSAN Cluster

Here is an example output using the first two functions:


For the vCenter Server version output, you will notice that I am also including the OS platform of your vCenter Server, so you can distinguish between a Windows vCenter Server and a vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) which can be useful to see if you have been #migrate2vcsa ;). For the ESXi version output, you will notice the "OriginalInstallDate" value, this is actually new API property that was introduced in vSphere 6.5 and it provides you with the original installation date of your ESXi host (more details can be found here) which is pretty neat.

Here is an example output using last function:


If you wanted to take this a step further, you could even take this output and dynamically update the vSphere UI using either Custom Attributes or vSphere Tags so you know what version the software is at any given moment. Its easy enough to set this up as a scheduled task that could run periodically so you always have the latest information provided in the vSphere UIs.

Although this is a significant improvement over the existing manual methods, I think most of you will agree that it would be ideal if this information was natively available within the product which means BOTH UI and APIs. I think we all appreciate versioning of software is not always easy and it can change from release to release for a variety of reasons, most of which may not be technical. If the vSphere platform could dynamically pull this information in either real time and/or through an offline mechanism and provide this association by default, it would greatly improve the experience when needing to troubleshoot or perform maintenance of the vSphere platform. If this is something you would like to see, please leave a comment below providing your feedback. I know I have already pinged our PMs about this and I am sure they would love to hear form you as well!

Additional Information:

Note1: Update levels can be found using the vSphere API, take a look at this article here for more details.

Note2: As of ESXi 6.5 Update 1, the Update levels are also included by default in the Embedded Host Client as shown in the screenshot below:

Note3: As of vSAN 6.2, the vSAN Management API already includes vSAN version information that can be queried. Take a look at this script here which exercises this new API. For example above, I decided to not use this new API since customers may be running older releases of vSAN which is not covered by the vSAN Mgmt API.

Note4: VMware has also published simliar build to version mapping for other VMware products which can find the complete list here.

vCommunity "shorts" on their experiences w/the VCSA Migration

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The feedback from our customers on both the initial release of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Migration Tool (vSphere 6.0 Update 2m) as well as the updated version included in the release of vSphere 6.5 has just been absolutely fantastic! The feedback has not only been positive in terms of customers experience with using the Migration Tool to go from a Windows-based vCenter Server to the VCSA, but also with their experience with the VCSA itself which has come a long from when it was first released back with vSphere 5.0.

As with any customer feedback (good as well as the bad), I share this feedback directly with the Engineering/Product teams so that they know which areas customers have found useful and which areas we can still improve upon. One source of customer feedback which I see quite a bit of discussions on regarding the VCSA Migration Tool is on Twitter and being an active user myself, it is also makes it quite easy to collect and share this feedback internally. I even created the #migrate2vcsa hashtags a few years back to make it easy for customers to provide feedback for all things related to the VCSA Migration.

Most recently, I was looking for a better way to share as well as aggregate some of the feedback from Twitter regarding the VCSA Migration Tool. Instead of manually tracking individual tweet links via an email or document, I wanted to anyone to be able to get a quick glance at the overall feedback. I started to look around and came across an interesting SaaS solution called Storify which allows you to tell "stories" by using content from various Social Media sources such as blog posts, Youtube or Twitter for example.

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