Enhancement Request - Upgrade Best Practice Analyzer

[DarrenToews]

Just watched the Veeam LIVE regarding end of life of vsphere 5.5. In the chat, a couple of us were discussing that a report/script that would analyze your current vSphere environment and compare that to a vSphere Best Practices for upgrading to a newer version of vSphere would be very useful.

It could check things like VMFS level on datastores to ensure they're at the required level, check the version of distributed vSwitches, check certificates for SSO, etc. and then generate a report with what's at the correct level, what's compatible but lower than recommended, and what needs to be upgraded prior to going through the upgrade process.

If we could choose the target vSphere level, that would be great.

Just something that I thought would be helpful and might be helpful to others.

[Shestakov]

Hello Darren,
We have infrastructure assessment reports for backup and hyper-v infrastructures, but not for vSphere configuration, only vSphere VM Configuration Assessment so thanks for that request.
Could you provide the full list of checks you would like to see in the report?

[DarrenToews]

Essentially the stuff that is covered here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphe ... -guide.pdf

If this could be distilled into a report that could check the hosts, vCenter and existing vSphere subsystems to ensure they are at the required prerequisite levels that would be very helpful.

[Shestakov]

Thanks for the link, Darren. But it's about vSphere Upgrade.
I though your request is about misconfigurations and best practices.
Or the main goal was to check if infrastructure is ready to upgrade?

[jhoughes]

Just my own 2 cents around this, but it has the potential to be a lot of dependencies to determine, and there would already be gaps in the reporting (depending on which vSphere products you have deployed within your environment) which normally would not be gathered/reported within Veeam One (vRA, vRO, vRLI, NSX, VUM, etc.)

It would also require knowing your specific upgrade path (which specific versions you are upgrading from/to) to build specific reports for each upgrade path.

It would also currently require accounting for internal/external PSCs and those still running Windows-based vCenter, along with dependencies on internal/external MS SQL in those instances, which are some details that may not be gathered by Veeam One currently.

I wanted to add some thoughts around the fact that there would still be some gaps for things not directly related to versions of ESXi hosts and vCenter itself, which are typically the easier components to determine and verify prior to upgrading.

This would really be something that should come from VMware to assist with upgrades.

[Shestakov]

Agree with Joe. It also not really strategic to create a report for upgrade from the version which is to be discontinued.
Even if we make it perfect, such a report will be useful only for those who are on the latest version of vSphere and only once. In a year nobody will need it.