Ensuring business continuity with vSphere upgrade

VMware vSphere upgrade stabilises infrastructure for the future

This organisation provides IT services and solutions across a range of industries including education, business and charities.

With vSphere 5.5 coming to End of General Service, the customer wanted to upgrade to ensure continuity of service and infrastructure stability of their business-critical virtualisation platform
The project also needed to include validation and upgrade of associated 3rd party products along with other VMware integrated solutions such as SRM, vCOPS to vROPs and NSX to ensure interoperability across the environment
The work had to be undertaken in a way that ensured minimal impact to the live production client systems and services

vSphere migrations from version 5.5 u3 to version 6.5 u2
Upgraded SRM to version 6.5.1 and validated current version of NSX to ensure interoperability throughout the transition from 5.5 to 6.5. Replaced vCOPs with vROPs 6.7
Conducted post-functional training along with product training and overviews to provide the customer with the knowledge to allow them to better manage capacity planning and troubleshooting and alerting within the business
Provided information on postupgrade areas for improvement to help the customer with ongoing management and maintenance of the updated VMware infrastructure

Infrastructure Stability – moving to vSphere 6.5 ensures that the customers systems continue to be supported and are operating on a more robust platform
Reduced risk – the environment now contains a suite of products, all of which are fully supported versions
Improved interoperability – a fully integrated and validated solution has enabled a more effective and efficient environment
Improved knowledge – testing, documentation and reporting gave the customer greater knowledge of their environment, its management and identified future improvements