With vSphere 5 there are some new considerations as well as the same old set of considerations for upgrading from older versions of vSphere and Virtual Infrastructures. The same old set of considerations is:
- Can you upgrade your licenses, or did you let your SnS lapse?
- Will you perform an in place upgrade? Or require a reinstall?
- Is there a feature such as EVC that you need to enable during this refresh?
- Do you need to wait until your third party and VMware software supports vSphere 5?
- Do you need to upgrade any infrastructure VMs to support vSphere 5, ala databases, AD, etc?
However the new set of questions are:
- Do you need more licensing per the vRAM pools license model?
- Do you need to migrate clusters into a single vCenter to add those server licenses into your vRAM pool?
- Do you need to federate your vCenter’s to increase your vRAM Pool?
- Will you migrate from your existing vCenter implementation to the vCenter Appliance?
As we add more functionality within our virtual environments we need to consider how an upgrade will impact that functionality.
