Feedback on v5 to v6 upgrade plan

[Frosty]

Just looking for a quick bit of feedback. Have been waiting for v6 initial bugs to be ironed out and would like to upgrade now. Couple of questions that I still have after reading the Release Notes:

(1) if I in-place upgrade my VBR v5 to v6 will I need to re-create any jobs? Or will everything just seamlessly come over into v6 for me?

(2) will my old licence keys still work, or do I need to do some prep work to get new ones before I start?

(3) we are running ESXi v4.0 U2 on our hosts and sooner or later I will need to pull the trigger on an upgrade to ESXi 5 ... should I do that first and VBR v6 later ... or VBR v6 first and leave ESXi 5 until later (looking for the option with the least hassle and potential pain/risks).

[murdocmk]

We've done several v5 to v6 upgrades now and things have gone really well. It's always a good idea to read the v6 Release Notes because there is a section on upgrading there.

1) We did not need to re-create any of our backup/replication jobs so far. We have chosen to re-create replication jobs because some of the new replication features are only available after you re-create the job. Make sure your jobs completed successfully before upgrading. Also, we have been applying the hotfix patches right after upgrading and before running any of the jobs. In some cases that can avoid a full backup after the upgrade.

2) You'll definitely need your new license key.

3) We certainly have customers still running 4.x and have performed the Veeam v5 -> v6 upgrade for them without going through the vSphere 5 upgrade first. Maybe others will have reasons to do one before the other, but I think the Veeam upgrade is easy enough to perform that I wouldn't hesitate to do it first.

[foggy]

Stephen, just wanted to add, that (1) really depends on your current VBR deployment architecture. If you have multiple v5 servers, you might want to follow this procedure to keep all your existing backups.

Also, I would recommend to wait for the patch 3 available very soon. Thanks.

[Frosty]

Thanks murdocmk and Foggy; that's all very helpful.

Since we currently only have one VBR server and don't do any Replication, it sounds like the update in-place should be pretty straight forward and my jobs should all be updated automatically. I do think I will wait for Patch 3 to be released first, good idea.

Re: licence keys, given that it seems I need to obtain new ones, I assume that is done via our reseller ... is that correct?

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, you can update license keys through our sales reps.