vSphere 7 – The biggest innovation since the launch of ESXi. vSphere 7 delivers essential services for the modern hybrid cloud. There are a lot of new exciting features that are released with vSphere 7. One of them is the vCenter Server Update Planner. Major tasks performed by most of the vSphere administrator is vSphere environment upgrade. Checking Pre-requisites and other VMware Product interoperability with the version is a manual and lengthy task. This manual effort has been simplified a lot in vSphere 7 with vCenter Server Update Planner. In this article, we will discuss a brief overview of the vCenter Server Update Planner.

What is the vCenter Server Update Planner?

vCenter Server Update Planner provides native tooling to help plan, discover, and upgrade customer environments successfully. Receive notifications when an upgrade or update is available directly in the vSphere Client. The ability to monitor VMware product interoperability against the current version of vCenter Server running in the data center simplifies upgrade workflows. Available pre-checks assist with Version compatibility prior to beginning an upgrade.

During the vSphere upgrade, it is very important that we ensure other VMware products also upgraded to the compatible version. We use product interoperability to validate the vSphere version is compatible with other VMware products such as NSX-V, NSX-T, SRM, vSphere replication, Horizon View, vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, Log Insight, etc. This interoperability check has been simplified in vSphere 7. With vCenter Server 7, we will be able to run the WHAT IF scenario with pre-checks which will show whether your current environment would be affected by the Upgrade and also shows the individual application which needs to upgraded first and to which version.

Update Planner allows you to check interop with installed products and also run pre-upgrade checks so that you can validate that your upgrade will complete successfully

Update Planner provides the pre-update check results for review prior to the upgrade. These results can also be exported for reviewing off-line By click on the option “Export”.

The interoperability component of Update Planner detects installed solutions that are registered with the Lookup Service. Currently, the interoperability product list of components is unable to detect all VMware products. If a product is not detected it can be added manually by choosing the “Modify Product List” button.

I am sure the vCenter server Update Planner is an exciting feature to simplify the vSphere environment upgrade. This article just covers the basic overview of the vCenter Server Upgrade Planner. We will talk a lot about vCenter Upgrade Planner once we deployed it in our lab. I hope this is informative for you. Thanks for Reading!!!. Be social and share it in social media, if you feel worth sharing it.