vcenter 5.5
haven’t been on 5.1 too long and i’m already looking into moving to 5.5. i’m motivated by the fact that there are some critical shortcomings (some new, some longstanding) that are addressed in 5.5. in addition, 5.1 seems to be a somewhat buggy release.
i’ve been reading through various kb articles and the install guide this morning and it appears that this upgrade should be smooth sailing (in contrast to the 4.1 to 5.1 upgrade). i’m feeling fairly confident that this upgrade won’t have any problems (probably jinxing myself).
since i have all the components installed on a single server, i am going to try out the “simple install” method.
the same vcenter 5.x license key will work with 5.5 (previously i thought i had read otherwise). excellent license key matrix here: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=2059926
other than that, the only item i’ve found noteworthy is that the SSO admin account will be automatically changed from admin@system-domain to administrator@vsphere.local.
update 1/24/2014:
i applied the vcenter 5.5 update around 2 weeks ago. i used the simple install method and it was the easiest vcenter upgrade i’ve ever been through. i highly recommend using this method if you can. and really there shouldn’t be anyone that can’t as it’s recommended best practice to co-locate all the vcenter roles onto the same server (just recall that you need a decent amount of RAM nowadays for vcenter). the only issue i ran into was with VUM and that was because i had been struggling with VUM since vcenter 5.1. the VUM service would cease functioning but refuse to be stopped or restarted. only a reboot would resolve it. so during the VUM upgrade since the service couldn’t properly stop the upgrade of course failed. here’s the error that given – http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2059567. to resolve i rebooted the vcenter server and tried the VUM upgrade again and it was successful. also my VUM issues have disappeared since the upgrade to 5.5.
and…recently confirmed that after you upgrade to vcenter 5.5’s SSO module (which has been dubbed SSO 2.0) you can remove the old SSO database (which should be named “RSA”). my suspicions have been confirmed as well that windows based vcenter will eventually go away. the VCSA is the future and will most likely be feature complete for the vcenter 6.0 release. also the windows based vsphere client (sometimes called the C# client) support goes away after vsphere/vcenter 5.5 (this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone at this point). VUM will be going away and will be replaced by similar functionality in vcenter (most likely debuted in vcenter 6.0). and finally vsphere/vcenter 6.0 will probably cut off support for virtual hardware level 4 (this hasn’t been confirmed yet but it’s a strong rumor).
check SSO functionality go here:
https://vcenter.mydomain.com:7444/lookupservice/sdk