Is VMware 6.5 considered safe yet?

[tom11011]

Hi group,

Been out of the loop for a few months. Still running VMware 6.0 latest updates.

Is VMware 6.5 still considered problematic? Debating whether or not to install it on a new setup or just stick with good old 6.0 Update 3.

[tom11011]

lol nobody has an opinion? I probably answered my own question.

[f0st3r]

Well, I attended VeeamOn this year and during one of the breakout sessions one of the vmware dudes said "6.0U3 is rock solid, I use it in all of my labs". We are using 6.0U3 and it is rock solid. I think I am just going to wait for now, maybe sometime this summer upgrade? The only common issue I still see that gets people is the HCL, if you are running older hardware just check and make sure it is still compatible, apparently they removed a lot of older hardware from the HCL. A good resource for vmware info is https://www.reddit.com/r/vmware/

[skrause]

If you read Gostev's weekly emails, sometimes the question seems to be is any VMware version above 5.5 safe yet?

[sg_sc]

They redid the USB driver in 6.5, that seems to screw up some USB dongles for licensing.

[yunales]

just my 2cents

6.0u3 is rock solid, the problem with 6.5 is you lose the "good client" (as a vmware support tech used to call it) and need to use either the flash web client(slow PITA) OR the new HTML5 client which has like 10% of the features.

Also you lose easy access to your VM annotation fields if you use them. (i.e. for reporting purposes) You need to migrate to Tags which is a PITA as well as they aren't the same as free STRING fields

so we don't use it and will perhaps skip it completely.

[sg_sc]

Important hotfix update for the rock solid 6.0 branch

[sbjelkfelt]

We've been running 6.5 in our production environment for a couple of months now, and after a few hiccups with older firmware (HPE G9) it's been stable, including our Veeam backups. (B&R 9.5 U2)
As the others have mentionend, you do loose the good old C#-client and need to use the "slightly improved since 6.0" webclient or the HTML5-client.

If you need to use some of the new features in 6.5 - by all means, give it a try but do install it in a test environment first - in hindsight, I still believe that 6.0 U3 is the "better" version of the two.

[tom11011]

Thanks everyone, sticking with 6.0 for now.

[micoolpaul]

Just to jump in and say I've gone to 6.5 and I'm really happy, the HTML5 client whilst more basic definitely covers the day to day features that I use and is so buttery smooth! Even the Flash client is noticably quicker as well and everything has had a really nice facelift to make it easier to access the common tools such as vmotion etc.

I'm using HPE custom ISOs gone from 6 to 6.5 and it's stable so far!