Upgrade

Upgrading production servers to vSphere: When and why

I wanted to know when current VMware users are planning to upgrade their existing VMware production environments to vSphere, so I ran a poll on my website. I then ran additional polls to find out the primary reasons that users are holding off on upgrading to vSphere, and to see if they are planning on upgrading their Enterprise licenses to the new Enterprise Plus licenses.

What I discovered is that while people are eager to upgrade to vSphere, there are reasons why others are waiting; and while some will upgrade from Enterprise to Enterprise Plus licensing before the end of the year, a number of respondents indicated that they have no plans to upgrade at all.

When will you upgrade?

The first poll clearly indicated that many existing customers will be quick to upgrade to vSphere to benefit from the new technologies. Out of 140 responses, 32% are planning to upgrade within 3-6 months and another 25% of users are planning on upgrading within 0-3 months.

Only 12% had already upgraded to vSphere, so my second poll was to find out the primary reason that users were holding off on upgrading to vSphere. Continued »

Should you upgrade to VMware vSphere 4?

Since I am an independent consultant and VMware Communities Guru, I have recently been asked many questions about whether or not to upgrade to VMware vSphere 4. My answers depends on the following items:

• The hardware involved. VMware vSphere has certain hardware requriements, if your target hosts do not support these minimal requirements, then they are not good candidates for running VMware vSphere. The basic requirements are:

- 64 Bit CPU support. This does mean that some EMT64 machines will work. However they may not be on the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guides.

- Intel-VT or AMD-V support. This pretty much goes without saying; it is impossible to use VMware vSphere if these features are not enabled within the BIOS.

- No eXecute (NX) or eXecute Disable (XD) support within the BIOS. In some cases you are required to enable this bit to allow VMware vSphere to run.

• Continued »