With any new updates to vSphere, there are always a flurry of announcements about all of the shiny new vSphere features. This can understandably lead to many customers rushing to upgrade and take advantage of the latest features. Most seasoned IT professionals tend to err on the side of caution, and either wait for a new product to be out for at least a few months, or until the update 1 patch is released before jumping in head first.
Recently, I’ve had a lot of discussions with customers around upgrading vSphere to the latest 6.7 U1 version, which was announced at VMworld US and released in Oct 2018. One of the big drivers for this is certainly that vSphere 5.5 is now past end of support, but the other big drivers are some of the features in 6.7 U1. At the top of this list is the fully functional HTML 5 client, which you can try for free if you haven’t already used it. While the list of other advanced features surely makes 6.7 U1 enticing, I’ve heard customers commit on the spot solely based on their desire to move away from the flash web client.
With any jump to the latest version, there are always compatibility issues to take into consideration. One really big one that I’ve seen lots of chatter about since the U1 release is the with the most current version of Veeam (9.5 Update 3a). It seems that many customers ran into errors with Veeam after upgrading to vSphere 6.7 U1. After multiple posts on the Veeam forums, Veeam released a kb article outlining the issue and providing a workaround:
Of course, like any other registry change, this requires a reboot of the backup server itself to take effect.
This just goes to show that upgrading key infrastructure like a hypervisor isn’t something that can be taken lightly. There are lots of other dependencies to consider, and things can certainly go a little haywire even if it seems like you’ve covered all your bases. This will be fixed in the upcoming release of Veeam 9.5 U4, and for at least a couple customers of mine, that is a good reason to wait for that Veeam update before delving into vSphere 6.7 U1.
*Note – vSphere 6.7 is supported, it is only U1 that is currently not supported by Veeam until the release of Veeam 9.5 U4.
