With all the new releases that have spun out of VMware in the past few months it’s great to see all the excitement from my clients wanting to upgrade (and with good reason). There is an exciting set of new features and capabilities to add value to your environment in these releases.
However, make sure you temper your new release excitement by checking and double checking your planned upgrades to ensure everything in the infrastructure is compatabile with the new releases. A great place to start is the Release Notes for each product’s new version. Then check the VMware Product Interoperability Matrixes and the VMware Compatibility Guide. The Matrixes help you understand which versions of VMware products have been tested and support working with each other (did you know that SRM 5.5 won’t work with ESXi 5.0 U3?). And the Guide helps you understand all the partner ecosystem dependancies for different aspects of the VMware solution set (did you know that SRM 5.5 doesn’t yet have an EMC SRDF SRA available?)
I use the SRM examples above as I’ve had clients in the past who rushed to upgrade SRM without checking these two resources…and broke their deployment. When dealing with infrastructure components that are the foundation for your entire enterprise make sure you upgrade the systems from the bottom up as well as measure twice and cut once…
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