Webinar - Upgrading Your Data Center to VMware vSphere 6.7

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Webinar - Upgrading Your Data Center to VMware vSphere 6.7

Ken Willard, Senior VMware Certified Instructor, provides an overview of key new features in vSphere 6.7, and a discussion of implementation architectures and upgrade paths. If you’re a technical professional responsible for the management and deployment of previous vSphere releases, this session will provide valuable insights.

This 60-minute webinar will include:

A brief overview of the changes in VMware vSphere 6.7 release
A demonstration of the new client interface, which also manages key functions such as VMware NSX, VMware vSAN and VMware vSphere update manager.
Q&A

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Hello, and welcome to today's webinar, Upgrading Your Data Center to VMware vSphere 6.7, Features and Benefits. We are thrilled you decided to sign in, and you should be too, because by simply attending this webinar, you are automatically entered into a free draw for a free five-day vSphere ICM 6.7 course from ExitCertified. The winner will be announced by email on April 18th.

The webinar is hosted on Zoom, and the features you will experience today are merely a snippet of how we deliver our live online classes, which we call "iMVP." Unlike this webinar, our iMVP classes are interactive and allow students to see and hear both your instructor and classmates. If you enjoy the presentation today, and are interested in learning more about Training Anywhere with iMVP, please visit our website or contact us.

During today's webinar everyone's phones will be muted, so if you have any questions, please enter them in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. All questions will be answered during the dedicated Q&A portion of the webinar following the presentation. Today's webinar will be recorded and we will send each of you a copy of that recording.

Finally, today's webinar is presented by Ken Willard, senior technical instructor with a proven track record of enterprise architecting, implementation planning and production roll-outs. Ken specializes in system virtualization and consolidation, both server and desktop, helping technology teams approach virtualization while considering the technical, operational and organizational impact. Ken's colleagues endorse his extensive knowledge, professional service and strategic planning, just to name a few attributes, and I couldn't agree more. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce to you, Ken Willard.

Michelle, thank you very much. Very nice introduction there. Just as we get underway here, a couple of small administrative details. Michelle, it looks like we've got somebody that has already raised their hand, so if I could, I'm going to ask you to take a look at that. And then, I've just launched an interactive poll in the session. One of the things as we're thinking about upgrading to vSphere 6.7, how that could impact your environments, those kinds of things, I wanted to get a sense of where folks were today with production deployments.

So, it looks like we've got quite a few coming in here. About half of you are responding. That's fantastic. Got the numbers coming up. We'll give it just another few seconds here. All right, so we're at about 50 seconds on that poll. I think we've probably got all the feedback that we're going to get for that particular one, so let me share the results on that.

So it looks like, overwhelmingly, almost 60% of you are already at 6.5, which is fantastic. For those of you that are at 5.1 and 5.5, we're going to talk about probably some of the reasons why you may still be there. There were some changes that were implemented at 6.0, which really created some interesting scenarios for folks. We've got, actually, a substantial number. About 25% of those of you that responded said you're still at 5.5, and that puts you in a bit of an interesting situation.

So, let's close up the polling results there. I'm going to clear that out of my field of view. And let's talk about when we might not want to upgrade to vSphere 6.7, or when it's maybe not going to be an option right away. One of the first things that changed, that's impacting customers today, as of vSphere 6.0, there are really aggressive checking now, with regard to processor levels.

That was one of these things that VMware had always said, "This version of vSphere supports a certain processor set." But that was ... I don't want to say it was more treated as a suggestion than a requirement, but it was kind of more treated as a suggestion than a requirement.

And with vSPhere 6.0, the installation tool now does hardware checks. And if your environment doesn't meet the minimum processor requirements, it won't install, if you're doing a new, clean build install, nor will it upgrade your existing environment if it doesn't meet the minimum hardware specs. And so, what we see up here is the list of all of the non-supported CPUs as of vSphere 6.7.

And what happened was, and I've talked to a lot of customers, they got into a situation where they planned for, they had the budget, they'd renewed the support and service. They were all ready to go with the software upgrade, and then the requirement of the processor levels hit. And what they did not have in the budget was budget to do a hardware refresh along with the software upgrade. And so, that's left some folks in some sticky positions.

Right now, they're in a scenario, and a lot of those folks were at 5.5, obviously. The processor checking came into play at 6.0, and so they're at 5.5. Hopefully, you've all read the announcements. There's been a lot of trade press about it. 5.5 went out of support in September of last year.

So at this point, if you're on 5.1, 5.5, you're doing one of two things. You're either running in an unsupported configuration, or you're paying dearly for that extended life support contract. So, good reasons to be planning the upgrade and figuring out how to get to where you want to go.

But I know that many of you had hardware constraints that were potentially limiting your software upgrade options. So, that's vSphere broadly, right? As I mentioned, the processor checking started at version 6.0. This is the specific non-supported hardware list for 6.7.

The other thing that is impacting folks looking at going to 6.7 is that, for the first time that I can ever remember, VMware actually got two separate code tracks running, and the 6.5 update two, and then subsequently, the update two delta release actually are technically further down the line in the code base than the 6.7 original release, or as you see here on the slide, 6.7 update one.

So like I said, Michelle did a really nice introduction. And I've been working with this product since 3.02, and I can never remember another instance where they got the code track in a situation where it was technically a previous version actually had a code set that was later in the release schedule than the newer numeric version.

So, if you are running 6.5 update two, and almost half of you said you were on 6.5 of one release or another, at this point, upgrading to 6.7 initial release is not an option. Updating to 6.7 update one is not an option. Now, 6.7 update two did come out ... What? It was released two, maybe three weeks ago now, and I was looking at the upgrade paths.

Just what I saw in the upgrade path charts, it looks like if you are running 6.5, update two delta, you can upgrade directly to 6.7 update two. But folks, just to be completely forthright here, that's what it looks like to me in the documentation. I have not had a chance to test that in the lab.

So I would certainly encourage you, if you're looking at an upgrade path, the good thing about it is, it'll tell you, right? If you go to launch the 6.7 update two release update, and it will do the check. And if there is still incompatibility between 6.5 update two delta and the 6.7 update two, it won't let you put yourself in a bad way.

So, those are the two primary things that we're seeing with folks that have deployments today, of why they're not upgrading, for some of you, into the 6.x family at all. And for those of you that have been running 6.5 and consistently patch as those update security patches come out, you may actually be running a little later release in the code base.

So, now that we've seen the not-upgrade options, or the scenarios where you won't have an upgrade path yet, let's look at some of the things that have been released in each one of the releases that we've seen so far. The original base release of 6.7 is right at a year old, released ... Actually, I didn't realize that, but it's a year old today.

So, that gave us a few things that were particularly useful. For those of you that have particularly large data centers and large cluster deployments, Quick Boot is probably something that you have implemented right away. If you've not seen that behavior, the option to do Quick Boot when you have to do ESXi patching or updates, it gives you the ability to restart ESXi on top of the hardware without actually rebooting the hardware itself.

And so, unless you have process documents that require you, at every patch interval, to actually do a hardware restart and go through the power-on self-test of all the hardware, Quick Boot, depending on your hardware vendor, that can shave off two or three minutes per host. Sometimes, it can shave off as much as six or eight minutes per host, because in some of those bigger systems, the power-on self-test for hardware takes a long, long time.

The other thing that we saw introduced with the original 6.7 release was vCenter Hybrid Linked Mode. This was very clearly released in conjunction with, or to support the VMware Cloud on AWS product releases. But frankly, the other thing that that gives you as production deployment options, you might be choosing to do that with VMware Cloud on AWS. Or you might be doing that, maybe you're a big IBM consumer, and you're doing that with the IBM Cloud and you're running the vCenter deployment in the IBM Cloud.

Maybe it's one of those things that you're running with OVH, right? Hybrid Linked Mode works with any of the cloud providers, and gives you that cross-vCenter capability with some additional flexibility. There's no longer same-version requirements when you implement Hybrid Linked Mode, and we get some additional flexibility around the vSphere single sign-on deployments that support Hybrid Linked Mode.

We also saw that cross-cloud hot and cold migration capabilities. So, for those of you that have worked with the product, you are probably familiar with the idea of long-distance vMotions and how those work, but those have some very specific requirements around networking. We've got to have the same IP space available at the destination data center that we had at the originating data center, because we can't make those changes. With some of the enhancements that we now have for cross-cloud specific migrations, that got a little more relaxed in some of those requirements.

And the other thing that was really driven by the VMware on AWS solution was per-Virtual Machine Enhanced vMotion Compatibility. If you're using DRS at all, you're probably running a EVC-enabled cluster. What that lets you do is sort of level out, or tell your processors to speak the least common dominator from an instructor set standpoint.

We had to do that at the entire cluster level. Now, when we think about managing our Virtual Machines, some of them may be transferring out to one of the hybrid cloud providers. Others may not. We may not even necessarily have a requirement to run EVC at our on-premises cluster configuration. So, we now have the ability to support that on a per-VM basis, and not have to have it configured cluster-wide.

So, those are some of the big rockstar changes that happened at the base level of 6.7. If we look at 6.7 update one, that was released in October of last year, that gave us some flexibility in the upgrade path for those of you running 6.5 already. So if you're running 6.5 update two, just the base update two, you sort of had that same scenario, where there were some security and patch releases in 6.5 update two that were further down the code base than base release of 6.7. So, with 6.7 update one, you could now upgrade from 6.5 update two. So, there's still that limitation around update two delta.

The other thing that we're going to see is, the vCenter Converge Tool was released. vCenter made some announcements that, for those of you that are running standalone platform services controllers, that architecture has been deprecated from the product, will be going away.

And so, if you are running dedicated standalone platform services controller, we needed to have a nice way for you to bring those back into an embedded architecture model. That's what the Converge Tool does for us. And then the other thing is, hopefully, especially if you run multiple-site data center configurations, hopefully you're taking advantage of the Content Library.

The Content Library was one of those features, if any of you have ever worked with or know about vCloud Director, right? vCloud Director was a product that was probably the way that most of us were thinking about going, back in the 5.1, 5.5 days of the product. VMware announced that vCloud Director was going away as a product, and wasn't going to exist anymore.

So, what happened once they declared that was going to happen? Some of the feature sets that were in vCloud Director, we got to start seeing pulled down into core vSphere. One of the big ones of those was the Content Libraries. Content Libraries let you have a single master inventory of things like Virtual Machines, ISOs, reference files that you need for your VMS.

And you can have a master published library, and then if you run regional data centers, remote office data centers, those kinds of things, they can subscribe to that one master library, and everything gets kept current with a synchronization job. So, with 6.7 update one, we also added the ability to include Virtual Machine templates in the architecture, and to be able to deploy from template. So, that was a nice addition.

And then finally, as I mentioned just a couple of weeks ago, we got 6.7 update two. Now, you'll notice at the top, this is a little different. It was announced. It's not published yet, or at least, it wasn't as of the last time I looked. So, their commitment is, it's when they announce the code base is released and available in the same quarter. So, we know we'll have it by June 30th. I will tell you folks honestly, I haven't looked since early last week, so it may already be available.

But this is the point where they formally announced that the external platform controller model was going away. So we've now got the ability, not only ... So in the 6.7 update one, we had a dedicated standalone Converge Tool. Now, you see that that's been pulled into the vSphere client, so you no longer have to use a separate command line tool to change the deployment model for your vCenter. Much nicer user experience there.

We've got a couple of additional protocols added to the support for the file and database backup. So, if you are running vCenter Server Virtual Appliance, hopefully you're leveraging the native file-based backup. So, we added the support for NFS version three file systems, and Samba SMB version two file systems as additional supported protocols that the vCenter appliance can talk to, to push its backup jobs over to.

We got some new things around AppDefense. I'm probably not going to put a lot of emphasis on that, because as many of you are aware, AppDefense is in the new platinum license edition, so I don't know that a whole lot of you are running it. But the idea behind AppDefense is, it turns our security management model sort of 180 degrees.

If you think about what we do with perimeter firewalls and traditional antivirus and those types of approaches to IT security today, it's about having profiles of bad players in the market: viruses, worms, those types of things, and keeping the bad at bay.

AppDefense really turns that 180 degrees around. What we do is, we can now profile the behavior of your known good, pristine applications and how they interact with each other in the data center. We build up profiles of known good players in the data center. And then everything else, we just stop by policy.

So, it's much more effective in maintaining control and avoiding new attacks and new things that haven't been profiled in the marketplace, that we don't have the identifier for the bad player yet. And then the other thing is, as of 6.7 update two, you'll be able to build a single VM with up to 256 virtual CPUs and six terabytes of RAM.

So, as we've seen every time there's a new release, we get more and more scalability here. So, when you're thinking about potentially virtualizing your big data applications, even just your large databases, your high transaction rate databases, those kinds of things, we want to make sure that VMware vSphere delivers the scalability that you need to deliver on each per-VM basis, any of those resources for an enterprise level application.

So, those are sort of the major release updates for 6.7. Now, let's look at the sequencing. What is the approach here? If you've done any VMware upgrades in the past, you know. Always vCenter first. Then once vCenter's been upgraded, you update Update Manager. And that's only if you're not running the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance. If you're running the Virtual Appliance, those two upgrades happen concurrently because Update Manager is part of your vCenter Server Virtual Appliance today.

Then your ESXi hosts. Then your Virtual Machine Hardware. Virtual Machine Hardware is one of those pieces of the upgrade cycle that frequently gets skipped. Folks don't think about it. It gets overlooked, and most of the time, it's not a problem. But occasionally, that'll bite you. Just worked with a customer about six weeks ago, and they wanted to leverage some of the new features of the latest version of Virtual Machine Hardware.

And when they got into looking at their VMs, they figured out that nobody had updated their Virtual Machine Hardware since version nine. Well, current release of the Virtual Machine version Hardware is 14. And you cannot go from nine to 14 in one move. You have to do that incrementally, and it requires a reboot of the VM in the middle.

So, that caused them to have to schedule major maintenance windows for their VMs. So, please make sure you're thinking about your Virtual Machine Hardware. And then lastly, once you've done the Virtual Machine Hardware, update your VM tools. So, I've got a couple things here. I've got, actually, it looks like I'm seeing the same question in both the chat panel and the Q&A, so ... Actually, I've got a couple queued up here in the Q&A, so let's take a look at those for a minute, real quick.

"Will this slide deck or presentation be available?" Yes, this is being recorded and that, if I remember right, the team's going to mail out tomorrow. So, that'll come into your email, so there's that one. And then, "What about updating vSAN to 6.7?" That would be part of the process of updating your ESX hosts, right? The vSAN services are a cluster-configured service, but they are part of the ESXi code base. That is in the native Hypervisor code base, so that's running on your ESX hosts. So, the vSAN upgrade would happen as part of your ESXi host updates.

Talking sort of from memory here, but I don't recall anything about the vSAN update to 6.7, such as any changes to the on-disk object store architecture or anything like that. So, I think it's a straightforward update. You don't have to do any additional steps. Once your ESX hosts are at 6.7, you should see the vSAN code base come up natively. But again, I'm doing that from memory, so you'll want to be sure to double check to see if there are any host commands that need to be run to ensure that vSAN has completed its code base update.

The other thing that you'll notice, there's a special note down here at the bottom of this slide. For those of you that happen to still be running vCenter as a Windows-hosted VM, and there's probably a lot of you out there, because for the longest time, there was no graceful way to move off of a Windows-hosted vCenter and into the vCenter Service Virtual Appliance.

Folks, now is the time to start testing and planning that migration to the vCenter Service Virtual Appliance. 6.7 is the last version of the code that will allow you to run vCenter on a Windows host OS. And I don't know anything that you don't know, but whenever we vSphere version seven, the only option for vCenter at that point will be the Linux-based, the Photon OS-based Virtual Appliance.

And if you've not seen that process happen of converting from the Windows-hosted vCenter to the Linux-based Virtual Appliance, there are probably a dozen or more YouTube videos around that. Go take a look. But I will tell you, I've done that process probably four or five times, both in our lab environment and with production end user customers, and it works very reliably.

It can take a long time, if you think about all the things that have to be moved, but it does work very reliably. So, follow the step-by-step. Kick off each step in sequence, and then when you get to the final migration, just let it there and give it enough time to do its job. At the end of migrating all of the data, what happens is the migration process will send the command over to your Windows-hosted vCenter to do a clean OS shutdown on that side.

And then on the Linux side, it will reassign the network interface the IP address of the old vCenter Server, and reboot itself. When it comes back online, the Linux-based Virtual Appliance will assume the IP address and the fully-qualified domain name of your previous Windows vCenter Server, and should just take off and running.

The good news is, if for any reason that process doesn't happen, all you have to do, failback, power the new Linux Virtual Appliance version, and power back up your Windows version. So, you've got a nice failback if something goes wrong, and then you can do your troubleshooting.

The other thing that folks do occasionally consider doing as part of the upgrade is maybe re-architecting their environment. Sometimes, you change employers. You wind up working someplace new. You inherit a vSphere deployment that might not be exactly the way you would have chosen it.

So, if you're thinking about maybe doing some kind of a side-by-side migration, and re-architecting the environment as you do the upgrade, perfect. The one thing I would mention to you is, make sure as you're doing that, your new deployment that you're implementing, meets the test of the VMware-validated designs.

If you're not familiar with this, this is a standardized ... and I hate the phrase "best practice," because what's best at one organization might not be the best at another. But what I would say is, these are VMware-validated, tested, recommended practices for your vSphere deployments.

And then, you can adjust these or tune them, if you have specific things in your IT operations that you need to not be exactly in complete alignment with the validated design, for some reason or another. By the way, the other thing I want to mention, I'll mention it here and probably again at the end of the presentation, one of the other things that you're going to get from our team via follow-up tomorrow, all the things that I'm talking about, the link to the VMware-validated design sites, some other reference information, we're going to give you.

We're going to send you a follow-up tomorrow, of a one-page PDF that has links to all of these things. So, don't feel like you've got to chase down these web addresses, or find these things all for yourself. We're going to send you all of this out tomorrow as part of the follow-up to the webinar today.

So, just a few things to think about as you're planning. Potential areas that cause folks problems, right? VMware has a nice KB article, again this'll be linked in that document tomorrow, of things that you want to make sure you've marked the check box on before you start the upgrading process.

The other one is, hopefully you're all familiar with the VMware solution compatibility matrices. That means I'm running NSX, I'm running Horizon, I'm running vRealize Operations, or I'm running Veeam, NetBackup, one of the other third party backup solutions, right? Any of those things that directly tie into the vSphere code base that capitalize on vSphere REST APIs, those types of things, you want to make sure that you're running through those solution compatibility matrices out of the website, before you start your upgrade path.

Maybe [inaudible 00:31:30] you need to do an upgrade of your backup solution before you start down the vSphere upgrade path. There may be some outside solution dependencies there. So, once you get upgraded, what is the upsides? They've made some really serious performance tuning in the underpinnings of the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance. You'll notice it runs a lot faster under load, under transactions, much more efficient.

The HTML5 interface, much better as of update one for 6.7. I can't find much that's not already there. If you've been looking at that HTML5 interface, you know there are a lot of things that were missing compared to the Flash interface. That's been really cleaned up. The one thing that immediately comes to mind that's not there yet, is the auto-deploy feature and management, and the image builder under the HTML5 interface.

So, if auto-deploy is something you use in your enterprise, you're still going to have a few pieces of things that you need to do with the old web client, the Flash-based client. But other than that, everything is in the HTML5 interface today. You're going to pick up the ability to encrypt your Virtual Machines and do encrypted vMotion.

And by the way, for those of you ... I know at least one of you is thinking about vSAN and has it in your environment, even if you don't have vSAN, you can do individual Virtual Machine disk encryption on any supported VMFS target. So, you can take advantage of VM encryption even without vSAN. And then, we talked about the improvements in the reboot process for ESX host patches and upgrades, and the ability to leverage Quick Boot.

= All right, so the other thing I want to do, you saw it in the invite. I want to make sure that we've got some time here. You have endured enough of the talking head portion of the day. Let's get you into the live demo that we talked about. So, the demo actually said that you were going to get to see, and we were going to talk a little bit about the new vSphere interface, right? The vCenter-specific interface.

I actually want to walk you through three different interfaces in the time we've got left here today. One of the things that we've all had to get used to, love it or hate it, is the retirement of that C# client, the client that could be installed on our desktops. When that went away, that gave us a major gap. If something happened in a host disconnected from vCenter for some reason, we then had no graphic interface into that host.

Well, the answer to that was the ESXi host client. And so, if you've not had a chance to look at this, I just want to show you a little bit of this so you're building some familiarity. And you should notice a lot of consistency as we walk through the three user interfaces today. When you think about this ESX host interface that's now available on every ESX host in the environment, the new HTML5 interface for vCenter, and the appliance management interface that we're going to look at here.

These are all based on what VMware's calling their clarity user interface standard. That is an HTML5 standard, and you are going to see that deployed across the product lines. So, today, it's already in core vSphere. If you are running Horizon, you'll see that it's coming in the new Horizon Just-in-Time Management Platform server, so what they're calling the JMP server for Horizon. It's already there. It's going to be replacing the standard Horizon management interface and the connection brokers, so this HTML5-driven interface is what you're going to be seeing across the VMware product solutions.

So, when we look at this, again, this is just the resourcing and assets of an individual host, so we can see what networking is configured on this particular host. So, if we needed to, maybe we were having some networking issues, right? I might come in here and look. I've got, obviously, the management network specified. Maybe I need to come in here and do some troubleshooting on this, and see if somebody's maybe changed part of the configuration for my port group or something like that.

And so, we can come in and do some pretty simple, pretty basic host management there. Likewise, I can see what data stores it's still connected to and able to access, as well as I can look at and manage my Virtual Machine inventory on this host. So, let's go through the scenario. Something happened, and we actually lost power in the data center. And we didn't have the vCenter server configured. It's running as a VM, but it's not configured to auto-start when power comes back on.

I could use this to log into one of my hosts and restart the vCenter Server, whichever host it was running on, get vCenter back up and running. So, pretty basic, like I said. We could also do monitoring and management of the individual host itself, but it does give you that option if connectivity to vCenter's gone away, and you'd rather not spend half of your day doing command line management of your ESX host.

This is sort of the big user interface. This is the new HTML5 interface for vCenter, simply called the "vSphere Client." They've retired "Web" out of the name there. And you can see, we've pre-built here for the demo today, some pretty standard stuff. I've got a single data center with a single, three-node cluster. That three-node cluster, we'll take a look at here in a minute, but it's configured for all the usual suspects.

It's running HA for me. It's running vSAN for me. It's actually specifically not running DRS, and we're going to check that and make sure that's true, and then I'm going to show you some of that per-VM EVC configuration here. Actually, let's just go ahead and launch right on into that.

So, one of the things that's taken folks a little bit of time to get used to is, where some of the things have moved in the new user interfaces. So, when we think about any of the objects in the inventory, today, they will all now have a configuration tab. If there's anything at all to configure, that's where we'll find it. And so in this case, as I mentioned, we have vSphere DRS. We've got ... Oh, I did turn DRS on yesterday. I forgot about that.

We've got HA turned on. And then you see down here, this is configured as a vSAN cluster, so I can take a look at the vSAN services. And I haven't enabled a ton here. For the demo, I didn't turn up dedupe and compression or encryption. Encryption does still require the external key management server, which we don't have in the demo environment.

The only thing that's running here is the default performance service, right out of the base install. And we go down to the standard vSAN disk management, take a look at what's going on so we can see our individual hosts, and the disks that they are contributing. Again, for the demo, pretty basic setup. I've got a single disk group. Each disk group's contributing, then, one disk in the cache tier, one disk in the capacity tier. Let me pull my slider back up, and you can see. There's my one Flash device, my one spindle-based device.

So, the other thing I wanted to be sure to show everybody, because at least for me, when I went to start looking for this, it's not at all where I expected it to be. So, if you have an environment where you are going to be working in a hybrid deployment, so you're either going to be leveraging VMware Cloud on AWS, or you're going to be working, and I've mentioned OVH. I've mentioned IBM Cloud running vSphere. Any of those cloud provider options, and you want to be able to live migrate VMs into and out of your on-premises and out to the cloud and back.

You're going to want to make sure that that vMotion, the enhanced vMotion compatibility setting for that particular VM is configured and ready to go. One of the things you have to know about enhanced vMotion compatibility is, you can only configure it with the Virtual Machine powered off. If you think about what we're setting here, we're setting the instruction set that is presented to that Virtual Machine. Well, a Virtual Machine's guest OS only checks for its running instruction set once, when you power it on. So, because of that, you have to be powered off on the VM to set enhanced vMotion compatibility.

Now, I will tell you, for me personally, I thought, "This is a really cool feature. I'm going to go in here to 'actions.' I'm going to go to 'edit settings,' and I'm going to go find this 'enhanced vMotion' thing and turn it on." And I thought, "Okay. Is it under 'CPU'?" Right? Because I'm managing the behavior of the CPU and the instruction set.

No, it wasn't there. I thought, "Okay, that probably makes sense because it's really not configuring the Virtual Machine hardware. It's really probably on one of these 'options' tabs, and that really sounds like probably an advanced option to me." And I went looking through there. Not there.

What I will tell you is, I spent about 45 minutes, out of pure obstinance, digging around in the "edit settings" panel, and then I finally gave in and looked up the VMware KB article. It's not there. It's in the "configuration" tab for the specific Virtual Machine. And then under that, you have "enhanced vMotion compatibility."

And so you see, enhanced vMotion compatibility is turned off at the cluster level, and I have not configured it in my VM. I do not have to be running EVC at the cluster to be able to enable it on a per-VM basis. So, I can go in here and edit this setting, and then I'm going to want to know, right? If the idea is, I'm porting this between on-prem and my cloud provider, guess what, folks? That also means you're going to have to be buying the same manufacturer, the same processor family as your cloud provider.

Most of them are running Intel today, so you would say, "I want to go in and set enhanced vMotion compatibility for my Intel hosts." You see, I can go all the way back to the Merom instruction set if I would need to. Let's just say I know my cloud provider runs the Haswell chip set, so I could set that, say "okay."

And now, when I power this Virtual Machine up, regardless of what my on-premises hardware is capable of, vSphere is going to present the Haswell instruction set for that particular VM. And then, when I live vMotion that out to my cloud provider, out to OVH or out to IBM Cloud, wherever it is, assuming that I picked Haswell because I know that's what my cloud provider's running for their chip sets, the Virtual Machine live migrates. No problems.

All right. I'm pushing my time limit here. The one other user interface I want to be sure to show you is the management appliance interface. A lot of folks, particularly if you've not been working with the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance a lot, this is not something that's not necessarily familiar to you.

You'll notice, I'm going to the regular URL for my vCenter up here, and I've just added the specific port, 5480, to the fully-qualified domain name. That takes me into the appliance management interface. I'm going to do a quick login here, and just show you around a little bit on this.

It is a good way to think about doing backend management for your vCenter Server Virtual Appliance, if you want to. You can do monitoring right from this management interface, so we can see what the health and status of our vCenter is. All right, folks. Here we go. This is the beauty of a live demo, right? Sometimes, things do what they're supposed to, and sometimes they don't.

It looks like, in this case, my menu options are not working. All right. More than one way to skin a cat, because the other piece of this that I wanted to show you was the update capability right out of the management appliance. So, you'll see down there, the URL for that is simply, "/ui/update." So I'm going to manually go to that URL, and show you what this looks like. We hope.

There we go. So, what's happening right now, you see I've got the spinning disk in the middle. You can see, we're currently running the embedded platform architecture, so we've already come out of that standalone platform services controller. We've run the Converge Tool. We're running the new supported architecture.

I've already updated this to update one. That's what the designator there tells me. The "6.7.0.2" is 6.7 update one code release. And right now, this system is trying to get to the online VMware update repository, to see if there's anything new that's applicable to this particular deployment.

Now, it's not going to work, because we don't have public internet access allowed for this demo environment, so that will eventually time out. When it does, the other thing that you can do ... and I don't know that we're going to have time to wait on that here in the presentation today. But here, where it says, "Check for updates," it's kind of hard to tell, but that's a pull-down menu.

And you can say, "Check the CD-ROM only." So, if your environment were just like this, you're in what they consider a dark site. You don't allow your infrastructure Virtual Machines and your infrastructure architecture to talk to the live or the hot internet natively.

You could download the ISO for whatever update you wanted to apply, mount that ISO to the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance, and then simply tell the management interface to check its Virtual Machine CD-ROM for those offline updates that you had provided it. So, just wanted to kind of walk you through the three primary interfaces that we work with in 6.7.

The other thing that has happened just in the last month is, VMware has released some new courses, specific to those of you ... trying to align the course ware to what many of you tell us that your day-to-day jobs are. So, we've got an advanced troubleshooting workshop that folks had been asking for, for quite a long time.

The other thing that we see is, there's a new practitioner workshop. This is for those of you that, maybe you don't do a lot of large-scale deployments. You work with a channel partner, or you've got a VMware technical account manager, and they help you do your deployments. And you really need day-to-day operational patching and management type of training. That's what the practitioner workshop does for you.

And then we've got advanced skills for the vSphere professional, and that's really more sort of an advanced course around scaling, advanced networking, those types of things. So, troubleshooting, sort of practical, hands-on, foundational, day-to-day knowledge, and then those advanced, more specialty day-to-day knowledge topics are the way those three courses are structured.

So, from our standpoint, we've got some VMware training links here, to go look and see just what the general options. Couple of links to some specific classes out there. And again, all the links, all the references we've talked about with you today, we're going to put into a one-page doc that's coming out to everybody tomorrow. So, at this point, Michelle, do you want to jump back in here with me? And I'll start looking ... Looks like I've got another couple of questions that have popped in.

I can, yeah. I think if you want to open up the Q&A portion, we can dive into that now.

Yup. So, we've got a question up here that says, "The presentation itself really listed sort of the five primary updates." Right? But then later, I talked about the solution interdependencies, and when do you think about that? That solution dependency review, you really want to do on the front end. That's part of planning the upgrade sequence, because as I talked about, and again, we can jump back to that, right?

I said vCenter and then Update Manager. If you're running the appliance, those happen together. Then your hosts. It's probably one of those things, if you're running, let's just say, a third-party backup solution, right? That probably has to happen right in here, I'm guessing, for most of the backup providers. And they would tell you that from your backup.

So, absolutely. Very great catch that you do the solutions evaluation on the front end of your planning cycle, because that could easily be a sixth thing in your sequence here that has to happen, and it'll have some dependency as to where it happens. Great question.

Other things in the Q&A today. Let's see. It looks like we've got some things happening in the chat as well. Oh, yeah. Steve threw in that there's an option to select a classic screen in the view. I had not seen that, so that's a new part of the 6.7 update two update. The other thing that, by the way, I don't know if any of you noticed when I had the demo up, but in 6.7 update one, there's now a dark mode as well, so they added that to the user interface choices with 6.7 update one.