One of the things to verify before you perform any kind of upgrade activity for your vSphere environment is to secure that all the other infrastructure components used by or connected to your vSphere environment supports the version you are about to implement.
This includes but is not limited to e.g.:
- Physical servers
- Storage systems
- Storage Area Network components
- Network components
- Pluings used by vCenter Server
- Monitoring systems
- Backup and restore systems
One of the things that me and a few of my customers have been waiting for before the upgrade process can start is support for their Veeam Backup and Replication backup and restore environment. Yesterday Veeam released the R2 update to their Backup and Replication version 7 software which now includes support for vSphere 5.5. This is really good, thanks Veeam. Other VMware related functionality included in the R2 update are:
- vSphere 5.5 support, including support for 62TB virtual disks and virtual hardware v10 virtual machine.
- vCloud Director 5.5 support
- Support for for Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1 as guest virtual machines (VMs).
- The ability to limit maximum amount of active VM snapshots per datastore to prevent it from being overfilled with snapshot deltas. The default value of 4 active snapshots can be controlled with MaxSnapshotsPerDatastore (REG_DWORD) registry key.
There are more features added in the following areas:
- Microsoft – among other things support for Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V and free Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 support, including support for Generation 2 virtual machines.
- Built-in WAN aceleration
- Replication
- Tape
- Application-aware processing
- User interface
More information available at the Veeam web site here and in KB 1831