Platform9 recently announced a vSphere Integration product. If you haven’t heard of Platform9 before, they offer OpenStack-as-a-Service for management of private cloud installations. Platform9 manages the OpenStack platform and you manage your virtualized infrastructure. You don’t have to know or keep up with the inner workings of OpenStack to have a working platform. This new product announcement expands the platform from the KVM hypervisor to the vSphere hypervisor.

OpenStack is a very complicated platform. Gaining the knowledge needed to design, setup, and maintain an OpenStack system is time and effort not spent on fulfilling your business goals. As the platform grows, more time and effort is required to stay current and upgrade your implementation. The use of an externally managed system saves you that time and effort and that can be put directly toward your business goals.

Disclaimer: Platform9 provided me with an extended free trial account for the purposes of this article.

How does it work?

Platform9 deploys an OpenStack controller just for you. They install, monitor, troubleshoot, and upgrade it for you. With vSphere integration, a local VM, called a vSphere Gateway Appliance (VGA), deployed in your vSphere environment communicates with your vCenter server and Platform9’s hosted controller, eliminating the need for a VPN or other private communication channel between the controller and vCenter.

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I recently asked on twitter if the latest version of VMware’s Orchestrator, vRealize Orchestrator 6.0.1, would work with vCenter 5.5. I have not upgraded my hosts or vCenter to version 6 yet, but I wanted to save a step of having to upgrade vCenter Orchestrator to vRealize Orchestrator later if at all possible. I was directed to the VMware Product Interoperability Matrix. I selected VMware vRealize Orchestrator (Management Products), version 6.0.1 in step 1 and VMware vCenter Server (vCenter Server) and added it in step 2.

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On March 12, 2015, VMware released vSphere 6 for General Availability. I thought it would be a good time to recap, and pretty up, my older upgrade post. The previous post was based on vSphere 5.5 and the specifics of the software upgrades have changed, but the general order has not.

Check Compatibility

Read all of the Hardware Compatibility List, Interoperability Matrix, and other similar documents for all your components. Make sure all hardware is supported with ESXi 6 and that all software solutions support both ESXi and vCenter 6. Repeat with all other vSphere suite components such as SRM and the vRealize products. Contact vendors of incompatible solutions and find out when their v6 support is expected. If anything in your list does NOT support the latest version, make a decision on whether to remove or replace the components or to halt the upgrade until they are available.

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Since vSphere 5.5 was released in September, I’ve seen a lot of blog articles related to the upgrade process. Most of these articles deal with the implementation details of some specific step – upgrading the vCSA, migrating from an older version of vCSA, fixing SSO, etc. However, it seems like one of the most common questions in the freenode #vmware channel is still, “In what order do I upgrade my vCenter without breaking things?” Let’s answer that question at a high level, without getting into the implementation details.

This info is based on VMworld 2013 sessions VSVC5690 (YouTube) and VSVC4945 (requires VMworld login) taught by Justin King, Josh Gray, and Kyle Gleed, be sure to watch the presentations for additional details.

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At work, one of our vSphere datacenters has a relatively static VM count maintained by a single group operating under the vCenter Administrator role. Recently, another group has joined this datacenter and will need to provision 60+ VMs, then hand over the VMs to us for ongoing maintenance and occasional provisioning of 1-2 VMs at a time. We do not want to make these users Administrators, nor do we want to provision 60+ VMs. To make this work, these new users need more rights than the VM Power User role during initial provisioning; some rights will be taken back when they move to maintenance mode. vCenter doesn’t provide any roles that match either need, so I had to create one that had all the correct permissions.

As the built-in roles do not provide the proper permissions, some trial and error was required to determine the correct combination of permissions for our situation. I do not expect that these permissions fit everyone’s needs. Please take the time to test and ensure whatever settings you do choose hit the right balance between your user’s needs and security considerations.

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